Material innovation – inspired by nature

This paper is about biomimetics which also is called biomimicry or bionics. Biomimetics means “copying nature” and during time many examples of successful copying has been seen. However there are at least 2 significant difficulties in learning and copying from nature. The first difficulty is about the complexity of nature and the many fantastic solutions we find here.

It is often easy to recognise the splendour of a biological solution, but it can be much more difficult to understand the underlying mechanisms. As an example of this a case about optical properties in beetle shells will be described. The second difficulty lies in finding the biological solution that mach a given problem.

A methodology that copes with this difficulty by using biological search will be discussed.