Socially beneficial, profitable products that restore or at least leave the environment undamaged (i.e. sustainable products) remain an elusive goal. Emulation of the inherently sustainable living world through biomimetic design potentially offers one approach to creating sustainable or, at least, less unsustainable products. In this article, one learns, however, that current approaches to biomimicry do not necessarily lead to such ends. Examination of research and practice reveals a reductive mindset that limits biomimicry’s applicability within the context of sustainable engineering. To remove this limitation, this article proposes a holistic view of biomimicry that goes beyond imitation of a few features of a particular organism. A holistic view of biomimicry involves incorporation of life’s general characteristics in design and application of these characteristics across multiple spatial, temporal and organizational scales of engineering influence. The article initiates the development of holistic biomimicry as a guiding framework for designers interested in utilizing biomimicry’s potential as a sustainable design tool.
A sustainable global community requires the successful integration of environment and engineering. In the public and private sectors, designing cyclical (“closed loop”) resource networks increasingly appears as a strategy employed to improve resource efficiency and reduce environmental impacts. Patterning industrial networks on ecological ones has been shown to provide significant improvements at multiple levels. Here, we apply the biological metric cyclicity to 28 familiar thermodynamic power cycles of increasing complexity. These cycles, composed of turbines and the like, are scientifically very different from natural ecosystems. Despite this difference, the application results in a positive correlation between the maximum thermal efficiency and the cyclic structure of the cycles. The immediate impact of these findings results in a simple method for comparing cycles to one another, higher cyclicity values pointing to those cycles which have the potential for a higher maximum thermal efficiency. Such a strong correlation has the promise of impacting both natural ecology and engineering thermodynamics and provides a clear motivation to look for more fundamental scientific connections between natural and engineered systems.
Drawing from the substantial body of literature on life cycle assessment / analysis (LCA), the article summarizes the methodology’s limitations and failings, discusses some proposed improvements and suggests an additional improvement. After describing the LCA methodology within the context of ISO guidelines, the article summaries the limitations and failings inherent in the method’s life cycle inventory and impact assessment phases. The article then discusses improvements meant to overcome problems related to lumped parameter, static, site-independent modeling. Finally, the article suggests a remedy for some of the problems with LCA. Linking industrial models with spatially explicit, dynamic and site-specific ecosystem models is suggested as a means of improving the impact assessment phase of LCA.
Fundamental characteristics identified via observation of the inherently sustainable biosphere can inform and guide environmentally benign design and manufacturing (EBDM). In support of this premise, this paper identifies characteristics, extracts biological principles, translates them into guidelines for EBDM, and briefly reports on their application in situations of engineering interest. It outlines and illustrates the use of constant comparative method (CCM) to identify and extract fundamental biosphere characteristics from biology and ecology literature. Then, it translates these biological principles into general guidelines with associated metrics. To illustrate the efficacy of this approach, bio-inspired metrics are used for the purposes of assessing micro/nanoscale self-cleaning surfaces and designing a carpet tile recycling network. These efforts suggest that learning the phenomena responsible for the biosphere's inherent sustainability can yield insight into EBDM.
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