Environmental Engineering Reference
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journal papers containing the search term biomimetic reached 12,913, while the
search term ''bioinspiration'' was found in 667 journal papers, and biomimicry in
380.
Analysis of bioinspired materials requires knowledge of both biological and
engineering principles. As Vincent (
2006
) rightly put it ''if engineers are going to
be able to use ideas from biology, it cannot be stated too often that the biological
system must be understood before allowing ideas to be transferred into the engi-
neering environment''. Bar-Cohen (
2006
) states that bridging between the fields of
biology and engineering is crucial to harness the most from nature's capabilities.
This remind us the words of Sir Isaac Newton about the need of more bridges and
less walls, which is especially truth on scientific knowledge. It is important to
remember that biologists themselves have recently started establishing bridges
with physicists to investigate the weird field of ''quantum biology'' (the term of
''quantum biology'' was first mentioned in the beginning of the second half of the
twentieth century by Lowdin (
1963
)). Some recent investigations suggest that
plants use quantum ''computing'' to calculate how best to direct energy through
their photosynthetic complexes (Engel et al.
2007
; Sarovar et al.
2010
; Vedral
2014
). Other also suggest that some birds appear to use ''quantum entanglement''
to sense the Earth's magnetic field, helping to explain how they can migrate long
distances (BBSRC
2012
). This ''weird'' concept posits that entangled particles,
once separated, can somehow ''communicate'' with each other instantly so that
that a change in one automatically changes the other was famous for having been
referred by Albert Einstein as spooky action at a distance (Kaku
2010
).
Vincent and Mann (
2002
) compared solutions of some engineering problems
such as cleaning and joining surfaces by natural organisms with those by using the
Russian system of problem solving (TRIZ) and noted that TRIZ seemed to have
the main qualifications of an effective bridge between biology and engineering.
The use of TRIZ is suggested to be able to facilitate the transfer of ideas and
analogues from biology for engineering (Vincent et al.
2006
; Vincent
2007
). Other
authors (Denghai and Wuyi
2011
) proposed a four-step systematic method of
structural bionic design: selecting the most useful structural characteristic of
natural organism; analyzing the structural characteristic finally chosen for engi-
neering problem; completing the structural bionic design for engineering structure;
and verifying the structural bionic design.
The allocation of biomimetics education to either natural science or engineering
schools seems to be difficult to implement in both cases (Gebeshuber et al.
2009
).
The fact that biologists and engineers typically speak a very different language,
may create communication challenges (Helms et al.
2009
). In the words of
Gebeshuber and Majlis (
2010
), ''the biology papers are frequently inaccessible for
engineers, since they are too descriptive and contain concepts and approaches such
as taxonomy with its Latin names that are too far from any concept in engineer-
ing''. These authors thus suggest the establishment of a tree of knowledge and the
localisation of scientific articles on this tree.
An important difference between engineers and biologist concerns standardi-
zation. While the former are very familiar with standards this is hardly the case of
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