Biological Engineering Principles
Biological Engineering Principles
The level of control that organisms exercise over the materials properties of structural inorganic biomaterials is unparalleled in modern engineering. Even more tantalizing is the organisms’ ability to form multifunctional materials that are optimized to perform structural, optical, mechanical and other functions – almost unrelated from the engineering point of view.
Our studies suggest that these properties originate from a sophisticated structural design achieved by the interplay between inorganic minerals and organic biological macromolecules. Our research is aimed at studying biological composite materials and understanding how biology arranges simple minerals and polymers into complex architectures.
Among organisms that attract our attention are: deep-sea sponges that construct damage-resistant structural glasses; brittlestars with skeletons optimized for both mechanical and optical performance; a slimy biofilm that turns out to be one of the best liquid-repellent materials known.
Often nature’s solutions to engineering problems are so different from our conventional ways of thinking that the most fruitful way to investigate them is not immediately obvious.
We are therefore engaged in a continuous dialogue: we study the biological material itself to begin to understand its underlying principles, adapt these concepts to design a bio-inspired architecture, and then apply insights from the designed system to guide further investigation of the biological system.
Optics:
The most finely tuned, rapidly responsive, and precisely directed optical systems currently known can be found on the surfaces of living organisms. Studies of brittlestars’ tunable microlenses, sea sponges’ optical fibers, butterflies’ and beetles’ intense colors, and squids’ nearly perfect camouflage have revealed 3D architectures so intricately patterned down to the nanoscale that the topography itself controls the wavelengths and direction of reflected light.
Of particular interest to us, many of these architectures constantly reconfigure and/or control pigment movement to adjust their optical behavior in response to a changing environment. In conjunction with our collaborators’ investigations of the biological mechanisms, our group is developing bottom-up self-assembly techniques that allow us to create comparably elaborate yet tunable hierarchical photonic structures, and integrating these into the design of a new class of dynamic, responsive optical materials, such as self-adapting energy-saving window coatings that adjust their transparency in response to varying temperature, self-reporting sensors, and photonic encryption systems
