Bioinspired Materials Science and Engineering

13Bioinspired Materials and Structures: A Case Study Based on Selected Examples

Tom Masselter^1,3,4,*, Georg Bold^1,3, Marc Thielen^1,2, Olga Speck^1,3,4, and Thomas Speck^1,2,3,4

¹ Botanic Garden of the University of Freiburg, Botany: Functional Morphology & Biomimetics, Faculty of Biology, Freiburg, Germany

² Freiburg Materials Research Center (FMF), Freiburg, Germany

³ Freiburg Center for Interactive Materials and Bioinspired Technologies (FIT), Freiburg, Germany

⁴ Networks of Competence Biomimetics and BIOKON e.V.

13.1 Introduction

The term “biomimetics” denotes the transfer of “ideas” derived from the study of living beings to technical applications, thereby using structures and functional principles of the organisms as biological concept generators to develop innovative and often “surprising” solutions to various technical challenges. These biological concept generators are the result of a long and complex evolutionary pathway during which the organisms (in our case, plants) evolved all the features which we focus on in this study. Among these are:

1. A light weight coupled with a high load‐bearing capacity and excellent damping in unbranched beam‐like plant stems (see Section 13.2.1 for an example of a linear beam called the “Technical Plant Stem” that was derived from extant plants).
2. A high load‐bearing capacity as well as a benign fracture behavior in large stem‐branch attachments in which the branches are not shed during ontogeny (Section 13.2.2).
3. Highly specialized functional ...