Sunflower seeds grow in a Fibonacci spiral pattern -- which could help inform how engineers could arrange solar panels to maximize sun exposure for a given area for maximum efficiency.
Robo-Gull
- The unusual feature of SmartBird is the active torsion of its wings without the use of additional lift devices.
SmartBird is a robot modelled on the herring gull with a two meter wingspan and a carbon fiber frame. The whole thing weighs in at just 45og.
Plenty of robots can fly — but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011.
Sadly the SmartBird is not a commercial product. Built by Festo, an international supplier of automation technology, the SmartBird was created as a way for the company to develop and optimize hybrid drive technology. Coupled drives for linear and rotary movement, like the ones used in SmartBird, could have applications that range from generators that derive energy from water – so-called stroke wing generators – to new actuators in process automation.
Seaweed – Not Just for Sushi Anymore
Bull kelp image by August Rode, Flickr
A recent National Geographic article mentioned the energeticl qualities of seaweed.
Bull kelp, named for its bullwhip shape, is one of the strongest and most flexible seaweeds in the world and can grow up to 100 feet from its holdfast (similar to roots) on the sea floor to the tips of its leaves. The movement of the kelp’s leaves as they photosynthesize sunlight into energy inspired at least one Australian company, which is seeking to commercialize a system that generates energy from the gentle motion of floats bobbing up and down in the waves.
Turns out the company in question is BioPower Systems is already in the proces of deploying a pilot project to demonstrate the feasibility of their bioWAVE technology.
The bioWAVETM prototype currently under development will operate at a depth of 30m, while the planned 1MW commercial model will operate where the depth is 40-45m. An ocean-based 250kW bioWAVETM demonstration project is currently under development at a grid-connected site with further plans in place to develop a 1MW demonstration, followed by multi-unit wave energy farms.
The bioWAVETM is mounted on the seafloor, with a pivot near the bottom. The array of buoyant floats, or “blades”, interacts with the rising and falling sea surface (potential energy) and the sub-surface back-and-forth water movement (kinetic energy). As a result, the pivoting structure sways back-and-forth in tune with the waves, and the energy contained in this motion is converted to electricity by an onboard self-contained power conversion module, called O-Drive. The O-Drive contains a hydraulic system that converts the mechanical energy from this motion into fluid pressure, which is used to spin a generator. Power is then delivered to shore by a subsea cable.
Folding Light
Scientists at Princeton University have designed a more efficient solar cell by incorporating microscopic folds into the surface of the material. These folds, inspired by the structure of natural leaves, lead to a 47% increase in electricity generation.
“On a flat surface, the light either is absorbed or it bounces back,” said Yueh-Lin (Lynn) Loo a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton. “By adding these curves, we create a kind of wave guide. And that leads to a greater chance of the light’s being absorbed.”
Some of the simplest light-harvesting systems in nature rely on the presence of surface structures to increase internal light scattering. We have extended this concept to increase the efficiencies of man-made solar energy harvesting systems. Specifically, we exploit the wrinkles and deep folds that form on polymer surfaces when subjected to mechanical stress to guide and retain light within the photo-active regions of photovoltaics.
Princeton University Press Release
Nature article (subscription required)
Seasonal variation in mussel byssal thread mechanics
Mussels are not attached as firmly in the fall as in the spring. This paper shows that the problem is not a gradual decrease in the number of byssal threads but that the threads themselves are of poorer quality later in the year.
World’s Strongest Glue
I’ll check into this soon, but glue from bacteria seems pretty biomimetic. Apparently they use it to stick to rocks.
An insect army and a commentary on Canadian vs US funding models
DARPA’s latest call for proposals merited an interesting article in the Toronto Star. The advanced projects agency has requested labs to submit research plans that will lead to :
the controlled arrival of an insect within five metres of a specified target located 100 metres away. It must then remain stationary indefinitely, unless otherwise instructed … to transmit data to sensors providing information about the local environment.
The preferred methodology is to implant computational units in the larvae and allow them to integrate with the nervous system through pupation. A high goal indeed and one that is so far from any proven science that it certainly qualifies as ‘blue sky’ research. Last year DARPA gave out 3.1 billion for equally outside the box, high concept research. The Star article compares this to $325 million in similarly unconventional funding from the Canadian government. John Polanyi, the Nobel Prize winning Canadian chemist points out that :
The long-term, out-of-the-box approach is why the U.S. is the world leader in science. Canada thinks in the short term. It’s all about wealth creation here, having business models, setting milestones for work even before it’s begun.
It is my strong belief that the most basic sort of research has to be funded at very high levels to feed ideas and capabilities into the engine of commercially applied research. DARPA is clearly an agency that manages to do this quite well. A strict accounting of the money they spend would reveal a host of failed initiatives, the by products of these are staples of research science and have had wholly unintended consequences.
TheStar.com – Uncle Sam’s scientists busy building insect army.
Improving evolution
Imitating portions of the process of natural selection has led to the production of novel enzyme function.
By combining elements of protein engineering and directed evolution, researchers open the door to creating enzymes with diverse catalytic functions in a protein scaffold of their choice.
Hak-Sung Kim from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology recently described SIAFE – simultaneous incorporation and adjustment of functional elements. Reducing an enzyme to functional elements, then adjusting one element through random mutation, he was able to evolve new functionality from a well known enzyme. The parthway has great potential for directed evolution of enzymes that perform useful tasks.
Improving evolution – Nature Methods (subscription required)
More funding for flying fly robots!
The National Science Foundation has a CAREER award that rewards particularly promising young scientists with a 5 year (rather than the standard three year) research grant. The University of Delaware’s Xinyan Deng has won one to study robotic flies.
…one of the goals of the research is to study the flight attributes observed in insects and to investigate the underlying principles that result in flight stability and also lead to differences in performance in order to develop a methodology and guidelines for designing flapping-wing microaerial vehicles.
Beside mathematical modeling and theoretical studies, Deng hopes to design and fabricate workable flapping-wing microaerial vehicles, or miniature flying robots, that are capable of stable and maneuverable flight with biomimetic sensors.
More nano product available
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank based in Washington DC did a survey and found that there are more commercially available nanotech products.
Maynard and his co-workers found 212 products that use nanotechnology. This is double the number found by a similar survey carried out last year by EmTech Research, a pro-industry research group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Nearly half of these products were creams, cosmetics and supplements, designed to be applied to the skin or taken orally.
Nanobio is but a small subset of nanotech, but the increasing commercial viability has to be a good sign for the field.
Nature article (subscription required).
Psychopathic Robots Predicted
An interesting PDF by Roderick Wallace in which he makes a prediction about the uses of the first biomimetic artificial intelligence systems…to wit that they will be terribly unstable and prone to psychoses.
“The most likely use of the first generations of conscious machines will be to model the various forms of psychopathology, since we have little or no understanding of how consciousness is stabilized in humans or other animals.”
Psychopathic Robots Predicted. (robots.net)
