Biomimicry in New York State

Terrapin Bright Green and the Biomimicry Guild are working to spur biomimetic innovation in New York State. Through a NYSERDA-funded program, we are engaging manufacturers throughout the state and introducing them to the concept of mimicking natural forms, processes, and systems to create innovative new products and techniques in an industrial setting. Biomimicry is both a methodology and a design mindset that helps identify and solve problems in areas such as energy performance, efficient use of water, toxin reduction, and waste elimination. It helps point the way to advancements that are essential to ensuring the long-term competitive success of NYS companies and to creating more jobs in the state. In this paper, we show the resources that nature holds for industrial innovations, particularly in energy efficiency; we demonstrate with past results that companies can use biomimicry in a number of ways to be successful; and we describe the process that our team has developed to spur biomimetic innovation in New York State. Looking to Biology for Innovation: Form, Process, Ecosystem Biomimetic designs use the natural world for inspiration in a variety of ways. First, and most intuitively, biomimicry uses natural forms to inspire the form of manufactured products. Second, biomimicry uses natural processes as models for processes in manufacturing. Finally, biomimicry uses ecosystem-level interactions as inspiration for the organization of human and industrial systems. Companies have used each of these levels of biomimicry to transform their traditional research and development methods. Rather than working incrementally on improving existing ideas, biomimicry can provide entirely new ideas that can be integrated into companies’ products and operations in novel ways. Form In a successful example of finding inspiration in natural form, a company called Pax Scientific mimicked a form commonly found in nature to achieve impressive energy efficiency gains in rotational equipment. Traditional fans, pumps, and propellers consist of planar surfaces, or surfaces with simple curvature in only one axis. They use these geometries to generate centrifugal forces—forces moving outward from the center of rotation. These forces then generate turbulence that causes the gas or fluid to move or mix. Design faults include drag resistance, low output, energy inefficiency, excessive noise, and component wear and tear. (Oppenheimer and Fiske 2011). Jay Harman, the founder of Pax, noticed a recurrent geometry in nature that has fascinated man throughout the ages. From water flows, to kelp patterns, to shell architectures, nature repeatedly utilizes 3-dimensional centripetal spirals—oriented toward the center of curvature—for liquid flows. Harman reverse engineeried this geometry in a process that began