Dr Robert Yancey - “We can take a lot of clues from nature”
“The biomimicry trend has real
potential,” explains Dr Robert Yancey, senior director, global aerospace, energy, and marine, Altair, USA. “In aerospace, most composite structures are made using continuous fibre composites, which are continuous long strands of carbon fibre embedded in a resin matrix. When you look to nature, there are a lot of composites – bone, wood, a lot of plants and so forth. In most cases, they are not continuous fibre natural composites; they are shorter fibres; with fibres that line up with the major load direction. That is a more efficient way of designing a structure. We have a lot of work to do on figuring out how we can manufacture objects like that; but we can take a lot of clues from nature regarding composite design. “We’ve carried out a lot of
structural optimisation work in the aerospace industry and the type of structures that our software produces is more organic in nature, in terms of shape. Bird bones have an interior structure that also reduces weight. If we can learn from nature, and be able to start incorporating [these] types of design in our automobiles and aeroplanes, then we will further reduce weight.”
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Naturally inspired But will a similar approach work in the automotive industry? Professor Dale Harrow, dean of school and head of programme, vehicle design, Royal College of Art, believes that it will, helped by the way in which car design thinking is changing. “Car designers have been inspired by nature for years,” he explains. “But, until recently, they’ve only really been looking at it from a surface perspective. The difference now is that we can design in three dimensions more than ever before. You can build up very complex structures and think about structures in a very different way from the way that you used to. “The trends here at the RCA are
using multi-layers, tapering structures, bird bone images and so on, all inspiring new sorts of structures. It’s very different to the old engineering structures of putting bits of tube together or pressing things. The rapid manufacturing processes enable you to produce scale designs, but there is no reason why this couldn’t be scaled up. A student here has designed a car that can be 3D- printed and, because you can blend materials together, it gives you massive amounts of freedom, in terms of boundary layers, and you can also vary the strength enormously. For example, in the chassis you can build-in enormous
Bionic car inspired by the boxfish
amounts of strength, because you can easily build in triangulated sections; something you could never do normally.” The ascent of computer aided
design over the last 20 years has resulted in designers increasingly thinking in a much more three- dimensional manner – in a way their predecessors did not. The design process allows for visualisation in this way, but, according to Harrow, “it also allows the imagination of shapes that you could never hand-model or draw; shapes within shapes, too, even if you look at the potential for 3D printing.”
More organic design So far, work in this area – the
Aerobus is researching biomimicry for future aircraft interiors
www.automotivedesign.eu.com
May/June 2013
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