Down to the Bone: A Novel Bio-Inspired Design Concept

Abstract

The solutions provided through natural evolution of living creatures serve as an ingenious source of inspiration for many technological and applicative fields. Along these lines, bone-inspired concepts lead to fascinating advances in product design, architecture and garments, thanks to the bone’s exceptional combination of strength, toughness and lightness. Structural applications are inspired by the bone’s ability to resist fracture under a large spectrum of forces, while the high surface area and pore connectivity of bone architecture present exciting opportunities from an aesthetic point of view. Behind these inspirations, a disruptive common belief emerges: “down to the bone”, a journey in search of equality, universality and substantiality. Herein, we explore the current state of the art in bone-inspired applications in these fields, considering the two major categories of structural and aesthetic inspirations and discussing further technological developments.

XFEM for Composites, Biological, and Bioinspired Materials: A Review

“…During the last few decades, encounters with bioinspired elements have been more present in daily life, from aerodynamical train designs based on the beak of a bird [116], to more efficient building ventilation inspired by termite mounds [117] and robot movements that mimic human demonstrations [118]. In the field of structural materials, where new bioinspired materials are daily developed, the material fracture behavior is essential to understanding its deformation and yielding mechanics [119,120]. In this sense, the XFEM is an important computational tool to predict the mechanical properties of bioinspired structures.…”

How can research on modern and fossil bones help us build more resistant columns?

“…Using bone as a source of inspiration should therefore optimise stiffness, strength, toughness and lightness, and thus reduce manufacturing cost (both financial and ecological) while increasing the strength (and life span) of bioinspired (BI) structures. This explains why boneinspiration is increasingly used in fields as varied as art, industry, medicine, robotics, garment manufacturing, and architecture (as even in the past in the construction of the Eiffel Tower) [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. This evolution has been facilitated by the recent advances and versatility of additive manufacturing techniques, which allow the creation of objects with increasingly complex microarchitectures [19,20].…”

“…The kind of bones used for bioinspiration depend on the mechanical properties of interest. Historically, the focus has been on the human femur [12,21,22]; but since then, inspiration has spread to, for example, the spine for its mix of strength, flexibility and stability [23][24][25], bird bones for their combination of lightness and strength [13,17,26,27], woodpecker skull and sheep velar bone for impact load applications [28,29], or the relative proportions and articulation of human or other mammalian bones for robotic design [30,31]. However, if bone answers to functional constraints, its structure also relies on developmental and structural (e.g.…”

Design and Analysis of Energy Absorbent Bioinspired Lattice Structures

“…In that case, the final application is a bicycle helmet, thought as a prominent substitute of the expanded polystyrene foams commonly used for personal protective devices. The advancement of AM and the versatility it offers in realization of complex geometrical shapes [33][34][35], inaccessible by traditional manufacturing schemes, has opened the doors to manufacturing of lightweight and strong cellular lattice structures with tailored properties. At the same time, AM offers an efficient use of material, high customization, and design flexibility.…”