Introduction to Biotechnologies and Biomimetics for Civil Engineering - Biotechnologies and Biomimetics for Civil Engineering - page 8

engineering, which he termed biomimetics (Vincent et al. 2006 ; Lepora et al.
2013 ). However, the study of biological systems as structures dates back to the
early parts of the twentieth century with the work of D'Arcy W. Thompson, first
published in 1917. In this work that some authors considered the first major one on
this field D'Arcy W. Thompson looked at biological systems as engineering
structures and obtained mathematical relationships that described their form (Chen
et al. 2012 ).
According to Vincent ( 2001 ), biomimetics is the ''technological outcome of the
act of borrowing ideas from nature'' and this concept would have also been termed as
''biomimesis'', ''biognosis,'' and ''bionics.'' For this author, the term ''bionics'' was
coined in 1960 by Jack Steele of the US Air Force. In German-speaking countries, the
term ''Bionik'' has become widely accepted for the corresponding field to ''Biomi-
metics.'' ''Bionik''—combining biology and technology (Gebeshuber et al. 2009 ).
Figure 1.1 gives an overview of the history of biomimetics research. Terms
such as ''biomimicry,'' ''bioinspiration,'' and ''bioinspired'' are derived words
from ''biomimetic,'' and ''bioinspired'' is sometimes used to connote a presumed
heir of the word biomimetic (Shimomura 2010 ).
The publications on the field of biomimetics have experienced an amazing
increase from a few 10 papers per year in mid-1990s to the present, doubling every
2-3 years and reaching an annual production of 3,000 papers in 2011 (Lepora et al.
2013 ). A recent search on Elsevier's Scopus revealed that in 2013 the number of