Lessons and Challenges from Nature

Although human beings have marveled at nature for centuries, it is only relatively recently that scientists, and later on engineers, as a community have intentionally focused methodically on nature to improve the design of materials, devices, structures, and processes. Moreover, it is now easier to follow Einstein s advice when he suggests looking deep into nature because today we have microscopes and tools that allow us to better observe nature and that have improved our understanding of the micro and nano worlds. 

What is Biomimetics (Although less common, other expressions are biomimicry and bionics.) Biomimetics refers to the art of adapting, for our own benefit, processes, substances, devices, or systems that resemble what nature has devised. Learn from, understand, be inspired by, and adapt from nature. Perhaps the main motivation will be the economic benefit, but more importantly, we can study nature and learn how to develop a sustainable way of life as nature naturally does. 

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe the entire body of knowledge related to biomimetics that has been accumulated and studied by the scientific community. An excellent compilation is the Biomimetics, edited by Dr. Yosep Bar-Cohen (Bar-Cohen 2006). In addition, because of the complexity of nature and related applications, it is not plausible for a first-year student to comprehend all the details. Therefore, we will limit ourselves to a few examples, but with the intention, or at least hope, that students will understand, appreciate, and become passionate about this novel practice and value its importance for their future careers and professions, reiterating and rediscovering the relevance of biology in our basic courses. 

A quick and random search for the word biomimetic in some engineering and science journals revealed the following results  

to understand these numbers, we did a quick search for the words reactor and heat in the Journal of Chemical Engineering. We found 4,008 results for heat and 5,279 for reactor. This shows indirectly that relatively few research efforts are undertaken in the field of biomimetics. As expected, science journals have many more articles related to biomimetics compared with process engineering journals. However, journals in material engineering embrace the majority of the research related to biomimetics. 

---