Biomimetic Designs for Automobile Engineering: A Review

Abstract

Automobile engineering often demands creative and innovative concepts to achieve their performance and efficiency targets. However, the strategies used to create these concepts are evolving with time. Recently, heightened attention has been noticed to using biomimetic concepts in the field of automobile design. The studies that apply biomimicry to automobile design often exhibit improvements in vehicle performance and fuel efficiency. Consequently, biomimetic concepts have extended an opportunity to the automobile industry to generate futuristic designs with advanced technology. However, the innovations and inventions in biology are usually published with more complex terminology that is not convenient for the research community working on automobile engineering. Hence, a notable delay is present in transferring the recent discoveries in biology to engineering researches so that they can develop strategies to mimic them. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the biomimetic design approaches that have been and can be used in automobile design. In addition, the paper includes a classification of biomimetic concepts, which reveals the current research interests and highlights the areas with a deficit of research that is required to be addressed extensively in the future.

Multi-Objective Prediction of the Sound Insulation Performance of a Vehicle Body System Using Multiple Kernel Learning–Support Vector Regression

“…At present, interior noise is mainly controlled by applying acoustic packets on the noise transmission path. The acoustic package component is a multi-layer composite packaging structure with sound absorption and sound insulation performance [35]. Multiple acoustic packages are arranged in the front of the car, the door, the front, middle and rear floor carpets of the car floor, the car wheel hub package and other locations, which improves the sound insulation performance of the car body system.…”

Literature review on thin-walled and cellular structure designs for energy absorption

“…The foam density and wall thickness of the bio-inspired structure were discovered to have a substantial influence on their crashworthiness based on the examination of the novel design. When the bio-inspired construction was modelled with a 0.5 g/cm 3 foam density and a 3 mm tube thickness, the specific energy absorption was 1.6 kJ/kg. Another study [34] that was motivated by the cross-sections of bamboo and palms looked at the energy absorption of multi-cell carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) and aluminium (Al) square tubes under quasi-static axial crushing.…”

“…Due to their extreme lightness and exceptional energy absorption capabilities, high energy-absorbing thin walled and cellular structure biomimetic designs are in high demand across a variety of technical sectors, including automobiles [3], aerospace [4], protective armours [5], biomedical fields [6] and civil engineering [7] due to their ultra-light and outstanding energy absorbing performance [8]. Consequently, several energy absorbers with different structures such as sandwich structures [9], plates [10], honeycomb [8], and foams [11] have been proposed in recent years.…”

Bioinspired Topographic Surface Modification of Biomaterials

“…The field of biomimetics has developed throughout history because humans have understood that nature is a vast source of inspiration to find solutions to many problems identified in many areas. Examples of areas that have benefited from biomimetics include industrial applications, such as the design and development of Velcro [ 2 ]; architecture to improve heating, cooling and ventilation systems based on termite nests [ 3 ]; engineering using models from different animals to design and improve aircraft [ 4 ], ships [ 5 , 6 ] and automobiles [ 7 ]; and medicine for a massive number of applications, including tissue engineering [ 8 , 9 , 10 ], cellular adhesion and biocompatibility [ 11 ] and reduction in bacterial adhesion [ 12 , 13 ].…”