Bio-Inspired Engineering

The living natural world has been creating solutions for physical, chemical, and environmental challenges since the early history of the Earth. Bio-Inspired Engineering is a small, humble step toward putting some of the powerful examples of those natural solutions into the hands of engineers and others who are designing our technological world. It is intended to provide them with the power of bio-inspiration, to help them close the gaps between the elegant solutions of nature and the possibilities we can imagine.

In this new engineering text by noted professor Chris Jenkins, you will learn

• How nature has solved critical optimal structures that resist loads and force with compliant design.
• How to put to good use the evolutionary approaches to materials design in nature for such uses as self-healing materials, shape memory materials, piezoelectric materials, and magneto-rheological materials.
• How engineers can learn from the way that nature has handled the challenging problems of heat transfer and efficient fluid flow.
• How engineers are learning from nature to improve robotics design.

More and more, engineering design in the future will mimic and adapt the structural and material solutions that nature has evolved over eons to create the robust electronics, energy-efficient housing, and advances in consumer goods that drive the modern technological world. This book shows the first steps down that path.