The sandfish is a lizard having the remarkable ability to move in desert sand in a swimming-like fashion. The most out-standing adaptations to this mode of life are the low friction behaviour and the extensive abrasion resistance of the sandfish skin against sand, outperforming even steel. We investigated the topography, the composition and the mechanical properties of sandfish scales. These consist of glycosylated keratins with high amount of sulphur but no hard inorganic material, such as silicates or lime. Remarkably, atomic force microscopy shows an almost complete absence of attractive forces between the scale surface and a silicon tip, suggesting that this is responsible for the unusual tribological properties. The unusual glycosylation of the keratins was found to be absolutely necessary for the described phenomenon. The scales were dissolved and reconstituted on a polymer surface resulting in properties similar to the original scale. Thus, we provide a pathway towards exploitation of the reconstituted scale material for future engineering applications.

The fracture toughness of hard biomaterials, such as nacre, bovine hoof wall and beetle cuticle, is associated with fibrous or lamellar structures that deflect or stop growing cracks. Their hardness and reduced modulus were measured by using a nanoindenter in this paper. Micro/nanoscale cracks were generated by nanoindentation using a Berkovich tip. Nanoindentation of nacre and bovine hoof wall resulted in pile-up around the indent. It was found that the fracture toughness (K_C) of bovine hoof wall is the maximum, the second is nacre, and the elytra cuticle of dung beetle is the least one.

Many structural and functional properties possessed by plants have great potentials to stimulate new concepts and innovative ideas in the field of biomimetic engineering. The key inputs from biology can be used for creation of efficient and optimized structures. The study of the geometry and folding pattern of leaves of Mimosa pudica, referred as Sensitive Plant, reveals some of the peculiar characteristics during folding and unfolding. When the leaf is touched, it quickly folds its leaflets and pinnae and droops downward at the petiole attachment. With the help of experiments on simulation model, the variations in angle of leaflets and degree of compaction after folding are investigated.

Biomimetic design employs the principles of nature to solve engineering problems. Such designs which are hoped to be quick, efficient, robust, and versatile, have taken advantage of optimization via natural selection. In the present research, an environment-friendly propulsion system mimicking undulating fins of stingray was built. A non-conventional method was considered to model the flexibility of the fins of stingray. A two-degree-of-freedom mechanism comprised of several linkages was designed and constructed to mimic the actual flexible fin. The driving linkages were used to form a mechanical fin consisting of several fin segments, which are able to produce undulations, similar to those produced by the actual fins. Owing to the modularity of the design of the mechanical fin, various undulating patterns can be realized. Some qualitative observations, obtained by experiments, predicted that the thrusts produced by the mechanical fin are different among various undulating patterns. To fully understand this experimental phenomenon is very important for better performance and energy saving for our biorobotic underwater propulsion system. Here, four basic undulating patterns of the mechanical fin were performed using two-dimensional unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. An unstructured, grid-based, unsteady Navier-Stokes solver with automatic adaptive re-meshing was used to compute the unsteady flow around the fin through twenty complete cycles. The pressure distribution on fin surface was computed and integrated to provide fin forces which were decomposed into lift and thrust. The pressure force and friction force were also computed throughout the swimming cycle. Finally, vortex contour maps of these four basic fin undulating patterns were displayed and compared.

The micromorphologies of surfaces of several typical plant leaves were investigated by scanning electron micros-copy(SEM). Different non-smooth surface characteristics were described and classified. The hydrophobicity and anti-adhesion of non-smooth leaf surfaces were quantitatively measured. Results show that the morphology of epidermal cells and the mor-phology and distribution density of epicuticular wax directly affect the hydrophobicity and anti-adhesion. The surface with uniformly distributed convex units shows the best anti-adhesion, and the surface with regularly arranged trellis units displays better anti-adhesion. In contrast, the surface with randomly distributed hair units performs relatively bad anti-adhesion. The hydrophobic models of papilla-ciliary and fold-setal non-smooth surfaces were set up to determine the impacts of geometric parameters on the hydrophobicity. This study may provide an insight into surface machine molding and apparent morphology design for biomimetics engineering.

The applications of bionic methodology developed by the Laboratory of Design and Material Selection as basis in the creation of junction elements were demonstrated. These elements favor the application of Ecodesign in reference to the effectiveness of product dismount aiming the reduction of ambient impact in all its phases of use. The creation, the development and the confection of new junction elements were described, and case studies of new products developed specifically with this purpose were presented.

There are billions of tiny scales on the butterfly wings, which array regularly as the tiles on the roof. Such tilts can form various colors of the wing and afford the species many abilities to survive and propagate. Morphological experiments on the wing scales of six butterfly species living in northeast of China were conducted. By the optics microscope, the form, geometry dimension and array of the scales were observed generally. By using scanning electron microscope (SEM), the 2D scanning and measurement were carried out and the surface micro configurations of scales were observed. The dimension and microstructure characteristics of the cross section of single scale were achieved through transmission electron microscope (TEM). Finally, by using 3D software, three 3D models were described and the 3D visual effect was achieved. This work can put forward a basic method for the future study on the morphology of biological microstructure.

Multisensor data fusion (MDF) is an emerging technology to fuse data from multiple sensors in order to make a more accurate estimation of the environment through measurement and detection. Applications of MDF cross a wide spectrum in military and civilian areas. With the rapid evolution of computers and the proliferation of micro-mechanical/electrical systems sensors, the utilization of MDF is being popularized in research and applications. This paper focuses on application of MDF for high quality data analysis and processing in measurement and instrumentation. A practical, general data fusion scheme was established on the basis of feature extraction and merge of data from multiple sensors. This scheme integrates artificial neural networks for high performance pattern recognition. A number of successful applications in areas of NDI (Non-Destructive Inspection) corrosion detection, food quality and safety characterization, and precision agriculture are described and discussed in order to motivate new applications in these or other areas. This paper gives an overall picture of using the MDF method to increase the accuracy of data analysis and processing in measurement and instrumentation in different areas of applications.