The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature Is Inspiring Innovation by Jay Harman

Author:Jay Harman [Harman, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Green Business, Nature, General, Science
ISBN: 9781857889314
Google: UQp9DAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2013-06-25T00:40:44.698000+00:00

CLEAN AND GREEN

What would life be without flowers? So many of us enjoy growing, arranging, giving, or receiving their beauty. We use them in celebrations of life, marriage, birth, and death. We decorate our churches and bury our dead with them. We don’t often stop to reflect that they are the very sex of plants, the only sex organs most societies allow people to handle in public. In common with the sexual parts of all other life-forms, their design and functionality are based on the proportions of nature’s spirals. Sap flows in spiraling veins. Leaves are spaced radially around their stems in spirals—the optimum arrangement to share available sunlight. Photosynthesis occurs in spirals and most often, the number of petals and seeds are Fibonacci numbers—nature’s ratio of spiral growth. Now an Arizona inventor, Dr. Joseph Hui, has developed a solar panel array in the shape of a lotus flower that even opens and closes.

The lotus is one of the most commercially successful sources of inspiration for biomimetic products. Apart from their intoxicating, heavenly fragrance, lotus plants are a symbol of purity in some major religions. More than two thousand years ago, for example, the Bhagavad Gita, once of India’s ancient sacred scriptures, referred to lotus leaves as self-cleaning, but it wasn’t until the late 1960s that engineers with access to high-powered microscopes began to understand the mechanism underlying the lotus’ dirt-free surface. German scientist Dr. Wilhelm Barthlott continued this research, finding microstructures on the surface of a lotus leaf that cause water droplets to bead up and roll away particles of mud or dirt. Like many biomimics, this insight came quickly, while its commercialization took many years more. The “Lotus Effect”—short for the superhydrophobic (water-repelling) quality of the lotus leaf’s micro-to nanostructured surface—has become the subject of more than one hundred related patents and is one of the premier examples of successfully commercialized biomimicry.

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