Environmental Engineering Reference
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millions of years of evolution, Nature has most often selected the solutions best
adapted to the prevailing environmental conditions. The environmental sustain-
ability, which is inherent to natural organisms, is also another allure of the field of
biomimetics.
Bio-inspired design combines a deep understanding of the physical, chemical,
and biological phenomena and mechanisms behind a given shape, process, or
natural system with a rigorous scientific and technical development of a functional
application (Vincent and Mann 2002 ). While in many occasions in the past sci-
entists, engineers, and artists have looked into biological systems for inspiration
(e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, the Wright brothers, Antoni Gaudí), the explosion of
biomimetics as a research field occurred essentially in the last 10-15 years, fueled
by developments of many engineering and scientific disciplines and by the
availability of ever more powerful scientific instrumentation and manufacturing
technologies. A recent survey of the literature has revealed that the area has
expanded from less than 100 papers per year in the 1990s to around 300 papers per
year in 2013 (Lepora et al. 2013 ). The range of bio-inspired applications under
development or which have already seen commercial success cover disparate
disciplines, from materials science, nanotechnology and architecture to robotics,
computer science, and biomedical engineering (Lepora et al. 2013 ).
The field of materials science is one of the areas where biomimetics is likely to
have more impact (Whitesides and Grzybowski 2002 ). One of the reasons for this has
to do with the fact that when compared with synthetic, human-made materials,
biological materials are remarkably efficient in terms of fulfilling complex require-
ments with minimal amounts of matter (Wegst and Ashby 2004 ). The transposition
of the ability of many biological systems to sense, regulate, react, grow, regenerate,
and heal into new materials could yield unprecedented properties and performance
(Youngblood and Sottos 2008 ). Furthermore, the vast majority of biomaterials are
biodegradable and their basic components can be recyclable. Mimicking and
incorporating this aspect in man-made materials would have a critical impact in our
society both from an environmental and an economic point of view.
From a biomimetic view, the most interesting properties of biomaterials which
we would like to replicate are mechanical resistance (Barthelat 2007 ), optical
properties (Vukusic and Sambles 2003 ), self-cleaning (Bhushan et al. 2009 ),
adhesiveness and anti-adhesion (Hasan et al. 2013 ), self-healing (Trask et al. 2007 ),
drag reduction (Fish 2006 ), and thermal storage (Nikoli ´ et al. 2003 ; Sharma et al.
2009 ). The incorporation of many of these properties into materials like paints,
coatings, and films (e.g., Hasan et al. 2013 ; Zhao et al. 2011 ), concrete (e.g., Kumar
et al. 2011 ), glass (e.g., Mirkhalaf et al. 2014 ), ceramics (e.g., Munch et al. 2008 ),
fibers (e.g., Li et al. 1995 ) and insulation (e.g., Wang et al. 2012 ) which are
lightweight, benign, and recyclable could revolutionize the way infrastructures and
buildings are constructed (Fig. 3.1 ). Examples of biological materials which have
attracted scientific curiosity and technological ingenuity, and which are worth
looking at in the context of civil engineering include teeth, horn, bone, skin, tendon,
ligament, silk, shells, wood, bamboo, leaves, seeds, scales (fish, butterfly, reptile),
feathers, fur, and wool, to name a few (Wegst and Ashby 2004 ).
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