Abstract
Our mother nature has been providing human beings with numerous resources to inspire from, in building a finer life. Particularly in structural design, plenteous notions are being drawn from nature in enhancing the structural capacity as well as the appearance of the structures. Here plant stems, roots and various other structures available in nature that exhibit better buckling resistance are mimicked and modeled by finite element analysis to create a training database. The finite element analysis is validated by uniaxial compression to buckling of 3D printed biomimetic rods using a polymeric ink. After feature identification, forward design and data filtering are conducted by machine learning to optimize the biomimetic rods. The results show that the machine learning designed rods have 150% better buckling resistance than all the rods in the training database, i.e., better than the nature’s counterparts. It is expected that this study opens up a new opportunity to design engineering rods or columns with superior buckling resistance such as in bridges, buildings, and truss structures.
Highlights
Our mother nature has been providing human beings with numerous resources to inspire from, in building a finer life
More stress analysis and buckling analysis for additional biomimetic rods are presented in Fig. S1 in Supplementary Information (SI)
The biomimetic rods show a considerable improvement in terms of buckling resistance
Summary
Our mother nature has been providing human beings with numerous resources to inspire from, in building a finer life. The super hydrophobicity of the lotus flowers has been mimicked to design facade paints, tiles, self-cleaning glasses and surfaces where hydro-degradation o ccurs[1,2] Biohybrid systems such as microfluidic devices have been developed by inspiration from the fluid transportation of plants with the light energy stored in them through photosynthesis[3,4]. Pummelo is taken as an inspiration to develop structures with excellent damping p roperties[7] This fruit has a thick layer of skin around its pulp that is in the form of porous layers. Plant stem and root usually have porous structures Mimicking their porous structures may be a way of developing manmade columns or rods with superior buckling resistance. Based on our understanding of buckling resistance, these porous structures are good candidates to develop biomimetic rods with superior buckling resistance
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