Bionics - history, topics and examples

Learning from evolution means learning technology

The evolution can only work with the existing material, and is by no means perfect: orangutans, for example, are tree dwellers, but not 100% optimally adapted to the tree life. In humans, diseases such as disc damage caused by the upright gait.

For almost all the problems that arise in human constructions, there are meanwhile counterparts in nature that offer models to solve this problem: the gliding of the condor, for example, shows how a large body can fly in the air without crashing, and the bodies of the penguin, dolphin and shark show which forms are best moved under water.

contents

• Learning from evolution means learning technology
• What is bionics
• Technical biology and bionics
• Bottom-up or top-down
• Artificial body
• Model evolution
• nature and technology
• criteria
• Bionics and evolution
• Animals and technology
• At the beginning of the culture
• Fly like a bird
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Otto Lilienthal
• Muscling - The Condor
• winglets
• Fly like a bat
• Kingfisher on railroad tracks
• Aircraft hulls in tuna design
• The steering balloon and the trout
• Shark skin for diving suits
• Robot skate on the seabed
• The boxfish car
• The Squid - A dream for soldiers
• Stick like a gecko
• spider silk
• rodent knife
• The polar bear and termite house

What is bionics

Bionics, biology (technology) and (tech- nik) means the scientific practice of transferring biological solutions to human technology. Zoologists, botanists and neurobiologists, chemists and physicists work together with medical professionals, engineers and designers.

Bionics deals with the transfer of natural stimuli to technology. (Image: Michael Tieck / fotolia.com)

Technical biology and bionics

While technical biology explores the relationships between form, structure and function and uses technical methods, bionics attempts to technically implement structures and constructions of nature.

Biological functions, adaptations, processes, organisms and principles provide solutions to technical problems.

Animals and plants provide bionics with ideas for transferring the principles of action from nature into technology. This includes biotechnology, namely to use enzymes, cells and whole organisms in technical applications.

Bottom-up or top-down

A bionic product evolves in several steps - either top-down or bottom-up

Bottom-up begins with the exploration of the biological basis, form, structure and function (how are the feet of a gecko built?). Then the researchers try to understand the principles of action and laws (why can the gecko walk on the ceiling?).

This is followed by abstraction. The scientists break away from the biological context, develop functional models and mathematical models in order to technically implement the principles of action

In the end, the technical implementation on a laboratory scale, industrial scale and finally as a market product follows.

Top-down is the other way around. At the beginning there is a technical problem. For example, an existing product should become better. But how? Then the search for biological solutions begins, followed by biological foundations, abstraction and implementation.

Bionics should be innovative and creative, it is no longer just about the copying of nature, but to transmit fundamental effects on various fields.

Artificial body

In Anglo-American space, Bionics refers to artificially produced bodies and organs that mimic or overlay a living model. Other terms are robotics or prosthetics.

For example, neurology today is experimenting with prostheses that mimic human limbs and respond to mental commands. The plan is to transfer information to the brain and thus give the affected person their sense of touch.

One goal of neurobiological research is that artificially produced hands can be controlled by the brain in the future. (Image: Den / fotolia.com)

Model evolution

On the whole, the evolution of life is the model for technology - and indeed in natural creativity. Evolution According to Charles Darwin, "natural selection selection" means that the most suitable species with special abilities adapt to a specific situation.

The original function of body parts and senses can change completely: The front paws of the bats, for example, developed into wings.

nature and technology

So nature offers an inexhaustible potential for functional problem solutions that surpasses anything that people could think of. However, it is similar to technical progress. Particularly in times of industrial change such as the digital revolution, "innovation leaps" are needed.

For example, how can machines be constructed that take samples from the gorges of the seabed and avoid obstacles? "Underwater cars" with wheels are just as little question as submarines that can not move between scree and caves.

Here robots offer a solution that is modeled after lobsters, crawfish and crabs, with gripper arms, for which the octopus model stands.

criteria

A product is considered bionic only if it:
1) has a biological role model
2) abstracted from this model
3) is transferred to a technical application

Nature baffles scientists on a daily basis: Nearly every technical problem is a problem posed or posed in evolution and for which nature found a solution.

Bionics and evolution

Today's bionics compares its approach with the evolutionary process:

individual	Creature	Object to be optimized
mutation	Random change of genetic information	Random change of the variable input variables (= Object parameter)
recombination	Mixture of the parental genetic material	Recombination of the parental object parameters
selection	Selection of individuals most adapted to the environment	Selection of individuals who best meet the optimization criterion

Such optimized products serve to protect the environment, conserve resources, relieve the burden on the environment and support environmental protection.

Animals and technology

Learning from animals means developing technology. Biology has inspired countless engineering achievements: high-speed trains modeled on the kingfisher, with a layer of bone curbing the head when impacted by the water, or the sharkskin with its smudge paper structure as a model for diving suits; Trout were the prototype of the steering balloon, woodpeckers were the godfather of ice ax and jackhammer; Octopuses have the natural shape of cupping and articulated arms.

The woodpecker provided the template for the development of the jackhammer. (Image: mirkograul / fotolia.com)

At the beginning of the culture

Although bionics is a very young concept, it is at the origin of every human culture. For the biosocial development of humans has always meant copying nature culturally.

Our early ancestors saw the hawk's flight, made bows and arrows, and copied that flight. The lance has its model in the tusks of elephants and the horns of antelopes, the knife copies the teeth of big cats and wolves. When people hunted animals and made clothes from their skins, they imitated the fur that gave heat to the living things.

Traditional cultures that know about this dependency express this role model in the objects themselves: American natives carved the tips of their arrows in the form of falcon heads.

Fly like a bird

Pigeons fly as fast as they do enduring, and with a massive body - so they have all the qualities that should have a passenger plane. In fact, the least disruptive aircraft designed by Igo Etriel had the pigeon as a model.

The aviation pioneer looked at the fuselage and tail of his artificial aviator from city pigeons and wrote: "In the winter of 1909-1910 I designed the apparatus (...) on the model of a bird in gliding position."

Leonardo da Vinci

Already Leonardo da Vinci took birds as models of his flying machines and meticulously calculated how the flight worked for individual species of birds. Da Vinci grew up in Tuscany.

Leonardo's paintings, his sculptures, and his engineering machines characterized him as an overwhelming thinker, even among the universal scholar of the Renaissance: he was a painter, a mechanic, an anatomist, a scientist, a natural philosopher, and an architect.

But until today his sensual access to the world disappears behind the myth. Because Vinco was as creative as rooted in the ground. Leonardo's drawings of rural land around his birthplace show that the genius of rural Tuscany remained deeply connected.

What was unusual for a Renaissance artist was that he had no early childhood education in the arts. Instead, he grew up in the cultural nature of northern Italy, and the boy spent most of his time in the nature of the surrounding countryside.

Here, the child studied the movements of birds of prey and got the inspiration for his later flying machines. One of his earliest memories was a dream in which a bird of prey flew to Leonardo's face and pressed his tail against the dreamer's lips.

Such memories show that da Vinci's early roots in gaining knowledge were neither religiously Christian nor purely scientific in a modern sense, but resembled the shamanic thinking of traditional cultures that combine sensory experience and systematic understanding of natural reality. In this way of thinking science, art and natural philosophers are not separated, but different aspects of the same perception.

Leonardo examined how bird wings change their shape, ie, the hand wings spread at the tee, put together on impact, and he examined the structure and function of the bird feather. On this basis he designed flapping wings for flying humans. But they could not work because a person's body weight is far too large in proportion to the power of his muscles.

Otto Lilienthal is considered a pioneer of aviation. He graduated in 1891 the first successful flight in a self-built glider. (Image: Juulijs / fotolia.com)

Otto Lilienthal

Otto Lilienthal, the first successful man in the air, observed in his childhood exactly the flight of white storks. In 1889 he published his work "The bird flight as the basis of the art of flying."

The storks taught him that gliding is crucial to the flight. Storks sail long distances and thus save a lot of energy. The ornithological engineer concluded that it was possible to imitate this gliding flight when a human could only control the wings as well as a bird.

A cotton sail on a bamboo and raw linkage became Lilienthal's height glider. He was the first man to reach a higher altitude in the open air than on departure. Lilienthal flew successfully 2000 times, then crashed and died.

Muscling - The Condor

The Andean Condor is one of the largest flyable birds. He depends on warm air currents to get into the air.

Paul MacCready, an American engineer, studied condor flight and weather phenomena in the 1970s. His plan was to develop a flying machine that would lift as much weight as possible with little energy.

The condor with a weight of 13 kilograms and a wingspan of up to 3.50 m, which reaches almost 6000 m in gliding flight, was the ideal study object for him.

MacCready observed that Condors do not start on a cold morning, and spend a long time on Earth even after a sumptuous meal. From this he concluded that not the strength of the condor, but its wing span makes it possible to carry the weight.

He designed the "Gossamer Condor", an aircraft with a wingspan of 29.25 meters and a length of 9.14 meters. The construction on aluminum tubes and special polyester foil weighed only 31.75 kilograms.

The device was powered by pedals. In 1977, a professional cyclist, Bryan Allen, started with the "Kondor". Allen was the first person to lift off the ground on his own.

A few years later, MacCready built the "Gossamer Albatros," named after the only group of birds, some of which have an even greater span than the condor, and Allen flew with him across the English Channel.

winglets

The flyers among the birds spread in the Fug the outer springs on the wings and thus reduce the air turbulence, which otherwise form on the wing - they divide the air flow in many small "torrents" on. That's how they gain energy.

Aviation uses such "winglets" in the form of small vertical aircraft wings. They increase both the speed of fighter pilots and the energy consumption of transport machines.

The TU Berlin conducted experiments in the wind tunnel with a wing, in which the winglets could be individually adjusted.

Fly like a bat

Clement vein did not take birds but bats as a model for his Éole vehicle. He undertook the first manned powered flight. The ended, however, already after 50 meters.

Kingfisher on railroad tracks

Birds that inspire inventors to build airplanes - that's obvious at first glance. But what does the Kingfisher, which stands like a blue jewel in the air, then dive into the water and fish begins to do with a high-speed train?

For the head of the Japanese high-speed train Shinkansen, the engineers were inspired by the kingfisher. (Image: torsakarin / fotolia.com)

Eiji Nakatsu developed the Shinkansen, a fast train that connects Tokyo with Hakata. The difference in pressure when the train entered a tunnel was so great that it banged loudly every time - an imposition on the passengers.

The senior engineer was looking for solutions in nature and found the kingfisher, which causes rapid changes in air resistance.

The long beak of the bird reduces the shock between the weak air and strong water resistance. The Shinkasen received a "long snout", which solved the tunnel problem as well as the entrance into the water surface when fishing.

The train also became faster and consumed less energy.

But this is not the only "miracle" in the kingfisher's body: his retina contains two pits. Outside the water, he uses only one, in the water only the second. In addition, his retina contains oil droplets, so he perceives colors better and can orient themselves under water.

If science understands how this "underwater system" works, it can be used to build equipment to improve divers' underwater visibility.

Aircraft hulls in tuna design

The model for the ideal fuselage was not a bird but a fish. The aeronautical engineer Heinrich Hertel was looking for a pattern in nature for an aerodynamic aircraft, and the tuna gave a template.

Bonitos are particularly streamlined, because the part of their body with the largest volume is not located at the head, but behind the gills. So the water flows evenly past them. In addition, the body does not taper gradually at the tail, but abruptly. As a result, the flow tears off only in a small part of the body.

Other deep-sea and marine mammals have comparable body shapes, tarpons as well as dolphins - and they also serve as examples of aircraft engineers.

A Swiss aircraft called "Smartfish" honors with its name, the marine animals that provided the model. It has a domed fuselage like the tuna and thus consumes less fuel than other aircraft of the same size, is easy to steer and less susceptible to turbulence.

Tuna fish developed yet another adaptation to move faster. Their pectoral fins serve as rudder and brakes. When the tunas are at full speed, they fold the fins against the body. Today researchers are testing whether "exterior parts" of cars and fish can not be folded at high speed to improve the aerodynamics.

The steering balloon and the trout

The trout provided the template for a modern steering balloon.

Zeppelins had a short flowering in the early 20th century. The Zeppelin Hindenburg was one of the two largest airships. On May 6, 1937 burned the water-stuffing filling and 36 people died.

The ship burned to aluminum scrap at Lakehurst Airport in the US in half a minute. The exact cause is still unclear, the captain believed in an assassin. However, the result was certain: air traffic with Zeppelins came to a sudden end.

The trout acts as a model for the development of modern airships. (Image: Michael Rosskothen / fotolia.com)

Today, however, such steering balloons could make a comeback. The weather forecasts are far more reliable today, and storms can therefore be avoided. Modern technology could also control hazardous gas mixtures.
The Swiss Institute for Research and Technology Empa examines the trout as an archetype for such airships of the future.

Trout have low muscle mass. With its spindle-shaped body, it accelerates quickly. It uses flow vortexes ideally and moves with minimal resistance. For this she bends the body and hits the caudal fin in the opposite direction.

The Swiss scientists are now applying this movement to a new kind of steering balloon. Electroactive polymers (EAPs) provide this balloon with electricity by converting electrical energy into motion. These polymers are located where the trout's flanks and tail lie, and the muscles drive the wave motion in the water. The researchers thus recognized the problem of how the transformation of energy into movement can be increased.

Shark skin for diving suits

Just two decades ago, a smooth surface was considered ideal for moving underwater. However, the permanent swimmers of the oceans, hammerhead sharks or blacktip sharks, are covered by placoid scales made of the same material as shark teeth.

Their scales are grooved and staggered. As a result, they reduce the friction between the water and the body surface, and so the sharks increase their speed. The dandruff also prevents bacteria from spreading.

The sharkskin copied swimsuits at the 2008 Olympics, and their wearers achieved records.

Sharks' hydrodynamics, on the other hand, are still of much greater interest: today there are already ships with "sharkskin" coating, which use less fuel, and "shark planes" are a matter of time.

Robot skate on the seabed

Manta rays fly underwater. Zoologists call the fins of the rays quite right wings, because the fish move with them like birds flying in the air.

Scientists wondered how stingrays the energy for the rays, although the water pressure is higher than the air pressure.

The Rochenkörper solves the problem by opposing the pressure: skate fins do not yield under pressure, but bulge against him. The German researcher Leif Knies speaks of the fin ray effect.

Skates are cartilaginous fish. They have no bones like most fish, but their skeleton consists of cartilage. In evolution, the body of the snake slumped from above, allowing its fins to spread on its sides.

The Berlin bionic artist Rolf Bannasch designed a biomimetic robot based on the archetype of Manta Rays. Bannasch Tema wants to explore the seabed with the robot skate. This machine would have no propellers and so would not bother the biotope more than a roving fish.

The artificial ray could, for example, examine sub-cables. But the fin jet effect can also be applied in completely different areas: Festo AG in Esslingen near Stuttgart developed a bionic gripper modeled on the fish fin.

This "FinGripper" resembles a caudal fin and consists of three "fin rays", while it is 90% lighter than a similar gripper made of metal.

The boxfish car

Today car manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to produce fuel-efficient cars. First of all, such vehicles must be light and, second, good in airflow, less material, cheaper, less resource, and less weight.

The bionics found what they were looking for in the sea: the boxfish, a resident of coral reefs, has a strangely angular shape that gave it its name. With this shape, it is extremely stable in the water, a bone armor can withstand the water pressure. Its shape is outstanding in the current. The drag coefficient (cW value) is 0.06. This reduces the flow resistance.

The bone tank can be transferred to the body of a car. But the boxfish can not be copied directly. Because a car is not only much bigger, it also moves in the air, not in the water.

The result was the Mercedes-Benz bionic car. It combines maximum volume with minimal flow resistance. By bionic optimization procedures, the weight was reduced by 30%. The fuel in its class is 20% lower than other cars.

The tropical boxfish was the model for the Mercedes-Benz bionic car. (Image: airmaria / fotolia.com)

The Squid - A dream for soldiers

Flecktarn in ocher-brown in the desert, light and leafy green in the forest, gray-and-white in the snow - camouflage is part of the craft of the military. Soldiers can effectively disguise themselves in a particular terrain, but fail if they change their environment abruptly. A "Swamp Warrior" with mud in his face and rushes on the helmet looks like a lighthouse in the night sea in the sand desert.

A squid would probably laugh at soldier's disguise if he were aware of it, because this camouflage looks bumbling compared to its second-order color change. Cuttlefish completely change the color pattern, either uniformly or with stains and stripes. This is made possible by chromatophores, pockets under the skin filled with pigments.

These bags can expand or retract the animals by tensing muscles. The molluscs merge with any background and camouflage perfectly against predators and prey animals.

Massachusetts scientists developed a display based on this pattern that creates images through variations in the top layers. The patterns activate electrical impulses - as with the squid, which relax their muscles, depending on which electrical signals they receive.

In the meantime, militaries are working on a camouflage to transfer the desired properties of the squid to the soldier's skin.

The color change of the squid came to the public, as Jurassic World 2015 filled the cinemas. An artificially created dinosaur, Indominus Rex, carries squid genes and can therefore fuse with its surroundings, making it even more deadly than Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Stick like a gecko

Geckos are a large group of lizards that inhabit countless habitats in warm countries: rainforests like deserts, mountains like beaches, dumpsters in India as well as neon lights in hotels in Thailand.

Many types of geckos do not just walk up and down on tree trunks, but also horizontally and head-down on glass panes - whether humid or dry. They solve the liability in a few microseconds and apply hardly any force.

The secret lies in millions of sticky hairs (setae), which in turn split into hundreds of spade-shaped leaves (spatulae). These nestle in bumps, which are recognizable only in the nano range. Each hair has only little adhesive power. Millions of times this is gigantic.

A group of researchers led by Stanislav N. Grob now investigated hairy, noppy and mushroom-shaped structures and developed an adhesive film that achieves half the adhesion of geckos on glass.

Artificial "gecko hairs" are dry, can be detached several times and adhere to any kind of material.

American intelligence agencies are currently working on the "Stickybot", a gecko robot that climbs at least 4 cm per second. The prototype was developed by Stanford University.

spider silk

Spider silk excites bionics like no other material: it is more flexible than rubber and more tear-resistant than steel, and extremely lightweight. The frames and spokes of the spider webs are particularly strong, while the threads of the catcher spiral are enormously elastic.

Approximately 20,000 spider species build silk nets to catch prey. Our cross spider produces stable frame threads and elastic catching spirals. The silk is a long-chain protein molecule with crystalline parts that absorb the tensile load and an amorphous matrix that ensures the elasticity.

Using biotechnological methods artificial spider silk can be produced. (Image: ansi29 / fotolia.com)

The spiders produce the silk proteins in a spider gland in the abdomen. You can also pass them through a spin channel, where they salt out the proteins by ion exchange. A pH change alters the structure, the spider then pulls with its hind legs, and so from the proteins is a silk thread.

Biotechnology produces artificial silk raw material and steers it with a pump into a technical spinning channel where ions are exchanged and the silk protein solution is enriched. The solution is transformed by train with a roller in a silk thread.

Artificial spider silk is found today in microcapsules, filaments, nanospheres, hydrogels, films and foams, in medicine and industry.

rodent knife

Steel knives become dull, sooner or later plastics, paper or wood rub off the steel. The knives need to be ground, in the case of machines this means removing, sharpening, reinstalling and realigning. This is annoying, costs time, money and energy.

Rodents do not have this problem. Their incisors work like knives, but not dull. They grow several millimeters each week and rub off without shrinking altogether. On the contrary: Rodents need hard food, otherwise the teeth will become longer and longer. The teeth are always sharp, which makes them interesting for bionics.

The incisors consist of soft dentin inside and hard enamel outside. Because these two materials rub off to different degrees, the teeth remain sharp, because the soft dentin disappears and the hard enamel remains.

The bionic abstraction of the principle: Self-sharpening knives should consequently consist of two materials of different hardness. There are such knives: their core is made of steel, which wears faster than the outer ceramic layer, and the hard layer remains as a cutting edge. These knives last longer than the commercial products and they are always sharp.

The polar bear and termite house

Some termites use the heat of the sun and metabolism to ventilate their buildings. The air flows through a tube system upwards and below the surface downwards. This is made possible by a thermal gradient between the warm top of the building and the cool underground areas. Carbon dioxide diffuses through the porous building material, oxygen diffuses into it.

With the polar bear the white hairs guide light and warmth to the dark skin. There they are absorbed. Together with completed airspaces in the bearskin, the animal gains warmth.

W. Nachtigall and G. Rummel conceived a low-energy house in 1996, which combines the passive pore ventilation of the termites with the transparent heat insulation of the polar bear. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)

references
http://www.bionik-online.de/was-ist-bionik/

http://www.spektrum.de/lexikon/biologie/bionik/8744

People, companies and universities that work with bionics (Selection): 

Group of adapted technology
technical University of Vienna

INPRO innovation company for advanced production systems
in the vehicle industry mbH

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

Otto Lilienthal Museum

University of Bayreuth, Department of Biomaterials