Browsing by Subject "Biomimetic"
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Item Developing Biomimetic Design Principles for the Highly Optimized and Robust Design of Products and Their Components(2011-10-21) Wadia, Anosh PorusEngineering design methods focus on developing products that are innovative, robust, and multi-functional. In this context, the term robust refers to a product's ability to accomplish successfully its predetermined functions. Owing to the abundance of optimized and robust biological systems, engineering designers are now looking to nature for inspiration. Researchers believe that biomimetic or bio-inspired engineering systems can leverage the principles, mechanisms, processes, strategies, and/or morphologies of nature's successful designs. Unfortunately, two important problems associated with biomimetic design are a designer's limited knowledge of biology and the difference in biological and engineering terminologies. This research developed a new design tool that addresses these problems and proposes to help engineering designers develop candidate bio-inspired products or solutions. A methodology that helps users infer or extract biomimetic design principles from a given natural system or biomimetic product pair is described in this thesis. The method incorporates and integrates five existing design tools and theories to comprehensively investigate a given natural system or biomimetic product. Subsequently, this method is used to extract biomimetic design principles from 23 biomimetic products and natural systems. It is proposed that these principles have the potential to inspire ideas for candidate biomimetic products that are novel, innovative, and robust. The principle extraction methodology and the identified principles are validated using two separate case studies and a detailed analysis using the validation square framework. In the first case study, two students and the author use the principle extraction methodology to extract characteristics from a natural system and a biomimetic product pair. Results from this case study showed that the methodology effectively and repeatedly identifies system characteristics that exemplify inherent biomimetic design principles. In the second case study, the developed biomimetic design principles are used to inspire a solution for an engineering design problem. The resulting solution and its evaluation show that the design's achieved usefulness is linked to applying the biomimetic design principles. Similar to the TRIZ principles, the biomimetic design principles can inspire ideas for solutions to a given problem. The key difference is that designers using TRIZ leverage the solution strategies of engineering patents, while designers using the biomimetic design principles leverage nature?s solution strategies. The biomimetic design principles are compared to TRIZ and the BioTRIZ matrix.Item The Effect of Natural Language Processing in Bioinspired Design(2012-10-23) Burns, Madison Suzann 1987-Bioinspired design methods are a new and evolving collection of techniques used to extract biological principles from nature to solve engineering problems. The application of bioinspired design methods is typically confined to existing problems encountered in new product design or redesign. A primary goal of this research is to utilize existing bioinspired design methods to solve a complex engineering problem to examine the versatility of the method in solving new problems. Here, current bioinspired design methods are applied to seek a biologically inspired solution to geoengineering. Bioinspired solutions developed in the case study include droplet density shields, phosphorescent mineral injection, and reflective orbiting satellites. The success of the methods in the case study indicates that bioinspired design methods have the potential to solve new problems and provide a platform of innovation for old problems. A secondary goal of this research is to help engineers use bioinspired design methods more efficiently by reducing post-processing time and eliminating the need for extensive knowledge of biological terminology by applying natural language processing techniques. Using the complex problem of geoengineering, a hypothesis is developed that asserts the usefulness of nouns in creating higher quality solutions. A designation is made between the types of nouns in a sentence, primary and spatial, and the hypothesis is refined to state that primary nouns are the most influential part of speech in providing biological inspiration for high quality ideas. Through three design experiments, the author determines that engineers are more likely to develop a higher quality solution using the primary noun in a given passage of biological text. The identification of primary nouns through part of speech tagging will provide engineers an analogous biological system without extensive analysis of the results. The use of noun identification to improve the efficiency of bioinspired design method applications is a new concept and is the primary contribution of this research.