Biomimicry for Aerospace: Technologies and Applications

From the Back Cover
The growing science of biomimicry focuses on what humanity can learn from the natural world. For example, mosquitos can teach us to make hypodermic needles, jet engines can learn from harbor seal whiskers, and cacti may show us how to extract water from Mars. Biomimetics in Aerospace: Technologies and Applications focuses on five key technology areas for the broad aerospace and related communities: Education, Systems Engineering and Design; Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Machine Learning; Energy Conversion, Power, and Propulsion; Communications, Instrumentation, and Robotics; and Synthetic Biology, Life in Extreme Environments & Human Persistence in Space. With contributions from all over the world, readers will get a much broader introduction and deeper dive into the utility of biomimetics to solve a number of technical challenges in aeronautics and space exploration.
The solutions to technical challenges posed by flight and space exploration tend to be multidimensional, multifunctional, and increasingly focused on the interaction of systems and their environment. The growing discipline of biomimicry focuses on what humanity can learn from the natural world. Biomimicry for Aerospace: Technologies and Applications features the latest advances of bioinspired materials–properties relationships for aerospace applications.
Readers will get a deep dive into the utility of biomimetics to solve a number of technical challenges in aeronautics and space exploration. Part I: Biomimicry in Aerospace: Education, Design, and Inspiration provides an educational background to biomimicry applied for aerospace applications. Part II: Biomimetic Design: Aerospace and Other Practical Applications discusses applications and practical aspects of biomimetic design for aerospace and terrestrial applications and its cross-disciplinary nature. Part III: Biomimicry and Foundational Aerospace Disciplines covers snake-inspired robots, biomimetic advances in photovoltaics, electric aircraft cooling by bioinspired exergy management, and surrogate model-driven bioinspired optimization algorithms for large-scale and complex problems. Finally, Part IV: Bio-Inspired Materials, Manufacturing, and Structures reviews nature-inspired materials and processes for space exploration, gecko-inspired adhesives, bioinspired automated integrated circuit manufacturing on the Moon and Mars, and smart deployable space structures inspired by nature.