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Results for “bio-inspiration”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 109 records · Page 6
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Massless Exploration – Humans as a Solar System Species

A vision for exploration of the solar system in an earth independent manner is presented taking into account key drivers, challenges and future technological advances. This work was in response to requirements set by the NASA Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Office. Planetary targets, key assumptions and approaches to utilizing non-terrestrial resources are presented. The mission was divided into four sprints. The first sprint aims at a settlement on Earth’s moon. The second sprint aims at establishing a Lagrangian point station near the moon. The third sprint leads to the colonization of Mars and its moons. The fourth and final sprint investigated the exploration of Callisto, a moon of Jupiter. Bio-inspired approaches to technology and processes were considered to ensure that the in-space habitats are Earth like. The conclusion based on exploring the four sprints is that it is feasible to colonize the solar system without relying on earth but this relies on critical technology development and investments in emerging areas.

In-situ resource utilization↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Massless Exploration: Humans as a Solar System Species

A vision for exploration of the solar system in an earth independent manner is presented taking into account key drivers, challenges and future technological advances. This work was in response to requirements set by the NASA Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Office. Planetary targets, key assumptions and approaches to utilizing non-terrestrial resources are presented. The mission was divided into four sprints. The first sprint aims at a settlement on Earth’s moon. The second sprint aims at establishing a Lagrangian point station near the moon. The third sprint leads to the colonization of Mars and its moons. The fourth and final sprint investigated the exploration of Callisto, a moon of Jupiter.. Bio-inspired approaches to technology and processes were considered to ensure that the in-space habitats are Earth like. The conclusion based on exploring the four sprints is that it is feasible to colonize the solar system without relying on earth but this relies on critical technology development and investments in emerging areas.

In-situ resource utilization↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Retrieval-Augmented Generation and LLM Agents for Biomimicry Design Solutions

We present BIDARA, a Bio-Inspired Design And Research Assistant, to address the complexity of biomimicry – the practice of designing modern-day engineering solutions inspired by biological phenomena. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to act as sufficient general purpose task solvers, but they often hallucinate and fail in regimes that require domain-specific and up-to-date knowledge. We integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Reasoning-and-Action agents to aid LLMs in avoiding hallucination and utilizing updated knowledge during generation of biomimetic design solutions. We find that incorporating RAG increases the feasibility of the design solutions in both prompting and agent settings, and we use these findings to guide our ongoing work. To the extent of our knowledge, this is the first work that integrates and evaluates Retrieval-Augmented Generation within LLM-generated biomimetic design solutions.

biomimicry↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Retrieval-Augmented Generation and LLM Agents for Biomimicry Design Solutions

We present BIDARA, a Bio-Inspired Design And Research Assistant, to address the complexity of biomimicry – the practice of designing modern-day engineering solutions inspired by biological phenomena. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to act as sufficient general purpose task solvers, but they often hallucinate and fail in regimes that require domain-specific and up-to-date knowledge. We integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Reasoning-and-Action agents to aid LLMs in avoiding hallucination and utilizing updated knowledge during generation of biomimetic design solutions. We find that incorporating RAG increases the feasibility of the design solutions in both prompting and agent settings, and we use these findings to guide our ongoing work. To the extent of our knowledge, this is the first work that integrates and evaluates Retrieval-Augmented Generation within LLM-generated biomimetic design solutions.

biomimicry↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Emulating Nature: The Future of Sustainable Design with BIDARA

BIDARA (Bio-inspired Design and Research Assistant) is a GPT-4o chatbot that was instructed to help scientists and engineers understand, learn from, and emulate the strategies used by living things to create sustainable designs and technologies. BIDARA can guide users through the Biomimicry Institute’s Design Process, a step-by-step method to propose biomimetic solutions to challenges. This process includes defining the problem, biologizing the challenge, discovering natural models, abstracting design strategies, and emulating nature's lessons.

Brandon Ruffridge↗
DOE OSTI2023

Structure, Function, and Application of Self–Healing Adhesives from Mistletoe Viscin

Berries from the European Mistletoe (Viscum album) possess a sticky tissue called viscin that facilitates adhesion and germination onto host trees. Recent studies of viscin have demonstrated its adhesive capacity on a range of natural and synthetic surfaces including wood, skin, metals, and plastic. Yet, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, an investigation of the adhesive performance of mistletoe viscin is performed, demonstrating its hygroscopic nature and ability to self-heal following adhesive failure. It is identified that adhesion originates from a water-soluble adhesive component that can be extracted, isolated, and characterized independently. Lap shear mechanical testing indicates that the mistletoe adhesive extract (MAE) outperforms native viscin tissue, as well as gum arabic and arabinogalactan—common plant-based adhesives. Furthermore, humidity uptake experiments reveal that MAE can reversibly absorb nearly 100% of its mass in water from the atmosphere. In-depth spectroscopic and mass spectrometry investigations reveal a composition consisting primarily of an atypical arabinogalactan, with additional sugar alcohols. Finally, several proof-of-concept applications are demonstrated using MAE for hygro-responsive reversible adhesion between various surfaces including skin, plastic, PDMS, and paper, revealing that MAE holds potential as a biorenewable and reusable adhesive for applications in cosmetics, packaging, and potentially, tissue engineering.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Morphogenic Growth 3D Printing

Inspired by nature's morphogenesis, a new 3D printing process –growth printing (GP)– takes advantage of a self‐propagating curing front to produce 3D polymeric parts following a growth‐like development plan. The propagation of the curing front is driven by the exothermic polymerization of dicyclopentadiene (DCPD), which transforms the liquid resin into a stiff polymer as it propagates at 1 mm s −1 . GP is triggered when a heated initiator contacts the uncured liquid resin in an open container. The initiator nucleates the frontal polymerization reaction and the isotropic radial propagation of the growth front. Simultaneously, the initiator is moved up across the free surface of the resin, pulling the cured object out of the uncured resin. The motion trajectory of the initiator with respect to the free resin surface controls the growth morphology of the 3D part. An inverse design algorithm is developed to produce 3D parts by modeling the reaction‐diffusion‐driven solidification process. This process has substantial energy savings and high printing speeds.

3D printing↗
DOE OSTI2023

The hydration, microstructure, and mechanical properties of vaterite calcined clay cement (VC 3 )

Limestone (calcite) calcined clay cement (LC 3 ) is a promising low-CO 2 binder, but the low activity of calcite cannot compensate the reduction in clinker factor, resulting in low one-day strength and limiting its broad applications. As recent carbon capture and utilization technologies allow scalable production of vaterite, a more reactive CaCO 3 polymorph, we overcome the challenge by introducing vaterite calcined clay cement (VC 3 ), inspired by the vaterite-calcite phase change. In the present study, VC 3 exhibits higher compressive strengths and faster hydration than LC 3 . Compared to hydrated LC 3 , hydrated VC 3 exhibits increased amount of hemi- and mono-carboaluminate formation and decreased amount of strätlingite formation. With gypsum adjustment, the 1-day strength of VC 3 is higher than that of pure cement reference. Finally, VC 3 , a low-CO 2 binder, presents great potential as a host of the metastable CaCO 3 for carbon storage and utilization and as an enabler of carbon capture at gigaton scales.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Biologically-informed excitatory and inhibitory ratio for robust spiking neural network training

Spiking neural networks drawing inspiration from biological constraints of the brain promise an energy-efficient paradigm for artificial intelligence. However, challenges exist in identifying guiding principles to train these networks in a robust fashion. In addition, training becomes an even more difficult problem when incorporating biological constraints of excitatory and inhibitory connections. In this work, we identify several key factors, such as low initial firing rates and diverse inhibitory spiking patterns, that determine the overall ability to train in the context of spiking networks with various ratios of excitatory to inhibitory neurons. The results indicate networks with biologically-realistic excitatory:inhibitory ratios can reliably train at low activity levels and in noisy environments. Additionally, the Van Rossum distance, a measure of spike train synchrony, provides insight into the importance of inhibitory neurons to increase network robustness to noise. This work supports further biologically-informed large-scale networks and energy efficient hardware implementations.

bio-inspired computing↗
DOE OSTI2025

Mineralized sclerites in the gorgonian coral Leptogorgia chilensis as a natural jamming system

The soft corals (Cnidaria, Octocorallia), a diverse group of colonial marine invertebrates, can reversibly tune their body stiffness in response to external stimuli. This capability is attributed to their dynamic skeletal systems, which consist of thousands of mineralized skeletal elements, called sclerites, embedded within a gel-like matrix that swells/deswells and unjams/jams the sclerites, thus modulating skeletal stiffness. While sclerite morphology is widely used for species identification, its role in the mechanical performance of a soft coral’s skeletal system is largely unknown. Here, we investigated structure-jamming relationships in sclerite-based skeletal architectures using the red gorgonian octocoral Leptogorgia chilensis as a model system. The sclerites of L. chilensis exhibit a shaft-like geometry with two axial branches and two sets of triradiate side branches, which are aligned with the crystallographic symmetry of the constituent magnesium-containing calcite. By combining multiscale three-dimensional (3D) structural characterization, parametric geometrical modeling, 3D printing, mechanical testing, and discrete element simulations, we demonstrate how sclerite geometry achieves a balanced jamming performance in terms of stiffness, weight, strength, and fracture resistance in comparison to alternative geometries parametrically modified from the native sclerites (e.g., changes in the length and number of side branches). Here, we also found that these performance metrics are achieved through the effective interlocking among side and axial branches, which is further enhanced by the fractal-like microscopic spikes on the branch tips. The findings in this natural jamming system offer insights for designing synthetic mechanotunable material architectures for a wide range of applications, from soft robotics to mechanical dampeners.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Closed-Loop Control of Active Nematic Flows

Stabilizing and shaping autonomous flows of active fluids is a fundamental challenge and a prerequisite for applications. We embed a light-responsive microtubule-based nematic in a proportional-integral control loop that adjusts the applied light intensity in response to real-time measurements of the spatially averaged flow speed. The self-regulating hardware-software-wetware system maintains a target flow speed against external or internal perturbations, including protein aging and aggregation, sample-to-sample variability, and temperature variation. Varying the controller’s gains reveals antagonistic roles between feedback and intrinsic processes, leading to nontrivial dynamics observed in fluctuation spectra. In particular, oscillations emerge from the interplay between the controller, motor binding kinetics, and active hydrodynamic relaxation. Accounting for the underlying binding timescale, our coarse-grained model and nematohydrodynamics simulations corroborate these observations. This work provides insight into the coupled dynamics of controlled active matter, laying the foundation for spatiotemporal patterning of active stress to generate and stabilize new dynamical configurations.

Active nematics↗
DOE OSTI2025

Flow-Driven Stretch Fluctuations Govern the Nonlinear Viscoelasticity of Elongating Associative Polymer Networks

We use nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations to verify recent tube-model predictions that associative polymer networks exhibit broad stretch fluctuations during elongational flow. Simulations further show that these fluctuating dynamics give rise to the rate-dependent extensional viscosity 𝜂 𝐸 measured in filament stretching experiments on H-bonding networks. Simulations model bivalent associative networks with a reactive bead-spring model for varying association strength and extensional strain rate. We observe that stretch fluctuations are driven by a new form of chain tumbling, where chains continually collapse and elongate as their associations break and reform within the advecting network. This produces a broad, nearly uniform distribution of chain stretch over a wide range of strain rates, manifesting as a rate-independent plateau in the extensional stress. Our results show that the nonlinear viscoelasticity of associative networks is dominated by large fluctuations in molecular response, which cannot be captured by current mean-field models.

biomimetic & bio-inspired materials↗
DOE OSTI2024

The Function of Horn Ridges for Impact Damping

This study explores the damping effects of ram horn ridges on mechanical impacts resulting from ramming. We measured the amplitudes and frequencies of ridges along the axial (pitch) direction of the ridges of ram horns obtained from eight specimens across six different species. While the horns shared a similar spiral-shaped pattern with surface ridges, our findings show variations among the horns, including ridge spacing and growth trends. Additionally, we employed finite element analysis (FEA) to compare a ridged horn model with a non-ridged counterpart to provide an understanding of the damping characteristics of the surface ridges. Our FEA results reveal that the ridged horn decreased the initial ramming pressure by 20.7%, increased the shear stress by 66.9%, and decreased the axial strain by 27.3%, the radial strain by 16.7%, and the shear strain by 14.3% at a 50 ms impact duration compared to those of the non-ridged horn. The damping ratio was increased by 7.9% because of the ridges. This study elucidates three primary functions of the different species of ram horns’ spirals and ridges: (1) to transfer longitudinal waves into shear waves, (2) to filter shear waves, and (3) to stabilize the structure by mitigating excessive strain.

bio-inspired design↗
NASA NTRS2018

Biocene 2018 - Welcome to the Period of New Life

Biocene is the period of new life. When our descendants look back at this period in time, they will see evidence, in the geologic and electronic record, of anthropic climate change, growing population, and scarcity of resources. But they will also see the rebirth of human ingenuity as we overcame the challenges that faced us through nature-inspired exploration. The Periodic Table of Life (PeTaL) is a proposed tool and open source framework that uses artificial intelligence to aid in the systematic inquiry of biology for its application to human systems. This presentation defines the PeTaL concept and workflow. Biomimicry, biophysics, biomimetics, bionics and numerous other terms refer to the use of biology and biological principles to inform practices in other disciplines. For the most part, the domain of inquiry in these fields have been confined to extant biological models with the proponents of biomimicry often citing the evolutionary success of extant organisms relative to extinct ones. The primary objective of this paper is to expand the domain of inquiry for human processes that seek to model those that are, were or could be found in nature with examples that relate to the field of aerospace and to spur development of tools that can work together to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence in problem solving. Specifically specialized fields such as paleomimesis, anthropomimesis and physioteleology are proposed in conjunction with artificial evolution. Blockchain technology may be vital in allowing open source design tools such as PeTaL to democratize design and yet protect intellectual property. The overarching philosophy outlined here can be thought of as physiomimetics, a holistic and systematic way of learning from natural history. The backbone of PeTaL integrates an unstructured database with an ontological model consisting of function, morphology, environment, state of matter and ecosystem. Tools include text classification, thesaurus, data visualization, and analysis. Applications of PeTaL include guiding human space exploration, understanding human and geological history, and discovering new or extinct life.

Biocene↗
NASA NTRS2021

Bioinspired Honeycomb Core Design: An Experimental Study of the Role of Corner Radius, Coping, and Interface

The honeybee’s nest has inspired the design of engineering honeycomb core that primarily abstract the hexagonal cell shape and exploit its mass minimizing properties to construct lightweight panels. This work explored three additional design features that are part of the natural honeybee comb but have not been traditionally considered as design features of interest in honeycomb design: the radius at the corner of each cell, the coping at the top of the cell walls, and the interface between cell arrays. These features were first characterized in natural honeycomb using optical and X-ray techniques, and then incorporated into honeycomb core design, and fabricated using an additive manufacturing process. The honeycomb cores were then tested in out-of-plane compression and bending, and since all three design features added mass to the overall structure, all metrics were examined per unit mass to assess performance gains. The study concluded that the addition of an interface increases specific flexural modulus but has little benefit in out-of-plane compression; coping radius positively impacts specific flexural strength; but that the corner radius has no significant effect in bending, and actually is slightly detrimental for out-of-plane compression testing.

honeycomb↗