{"id":9862,"date":"2019-08-30T08:16:03","date_gmt":"2019-08-29T22:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/?p=9862"},"modified":"2020-06-20T00:07:48","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T14:07:48","slug":"building-beasts-through-biomimicry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/automotive-design\/building-beasts-through-biomimicry\/","title":{"rendered":"Building Beasts Through Biomimicry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Inspired by a fish<\/p><\/div>\n

Right from the beginning of automotive history, car makers have named their creations after animals.\u00a0 The reasoning behind this is simple: by giving the vehicle the name of a creature that\u2019s fast, powerful, graceful or dangerous, the user will, at least subconsciously, feel that the vehicle shares those attributes.\u00a0 We want our cars to have the sheer speed of the peregrine falcon (top speed in a stoop = over 300 km\/h, which is faster than what your common or garden Aussie Ford Falcon can do) or the aggression of a bighorn ram (Dodge) or the agility and elegance of a jaguar.<\/p>\n

However, what if the makers could take things a little further and actually give a car some of the actual attributes of a swift, agile animal? Not things like actual predatory behaviour, of course; otherwise, we\u2019d see Nissan Bluebirds eating Alfa Romeo Spyders, Jaguars and Porsche Caymans competing to devour Isuzu Bighorns, and Hyundai Tiburon (that\u2019s Spanish for shark) giving Corvette Stingrays serious grief.\u00a0 However, what if we could find out what it is that gives speedy creatures like the blue marlin and the peregrine falcon their seriously low drag coefficients so we can get better and more efficient speedy vehicles?<\/p>\n

This is where the concept of biomimicry comes in.\u00a0 Biomimicry is the design concept that looks to the natural world to get ideas and inspiration for more than just names and colours.<\/p>\n

The classic example of biomimicry in the automotive world comes from McLaren supercars and involves one of the designers being inspired by a stuffed fish.\u00a0 This stuffed fish wasn\u2019t your ordinary trout trophy but a sailfish, which is one of the fastest fish in the sea.\u00a0 The designer was so struck with this sailfish that he studied it to find out some of the features that made it so fast and if it would be possible to apply these to the supercar.<\/p>\n

Two features from the sailfish made it into the design of the McLaren P1.\u00a0 The first was the scales. \u00a0On the fish, the scales create vortices that push a bubble of air around the fish, meaning that it\u2019s slipping through less dense air rather than water so it can go faster.\u00a0 In the car \u2013which is already going through air \u2013 the features of the scales that generate these little vortices were applied to the engine to increase the flow of air for keeping things cool and for adding extra oomph. And it worked: the sailfish scale inspired design increased airflow by 17%. \u00a0The other design was the curve of the fish\u2019s body just before the tail fin, which straightens out air and water pockets to improve aerodynamics; it works just as well on the hypercar, minus the water, of course.<\/p>\n

Nissan has also got a bit fishy, although they were considering safety features instead.\u00a0 The designers were looking at how schools of fish act.\u00a0 If you, like me, have watched one of those nature documentaries on marine life, you\u2019ve probably seen footage of those huge schools of fish that seem to have the synchronized swimming thing down to perfection.\u00a0 They stop, start, swirl and turn almost simultaneously \u2013 and they never seem to collide with each other.\u00a0 The team at Nissan asked how this was possible.\u00a0 It turned out that each fish monitors its position relative to the fish in front of it, and makes adjustments so it can keep the right following distance.\u00a0 This idea was what led to the development of forward collision detection and autonomous braking systems, which is now a very common active safety feature on a lot of new cars and not just Nissans, either.<\/p>\n

However, care is always needed when attempting to mimic the natural world, as it can be very easy to overlook the big picture.\u00a0 Mercedes Benz famously attempted to look to nature for inspiration when developing a very stable car \u2013 the Bionic concept car.\u00a0 The idea seemed fantastic: the boxfish may look weird but it\u2019s extremely stable and can\u2019t tip over, no matter how turbulent the water is, but it\u2019s still got low drag.\u00a0 Mercedes thought this was great and set about putting together a concept car based on the shape of the fish.<\/p>\n

However, one thing the Mercedes design team forgot to think about was the fact that although the boxfish was stable but was still able to turn around easily, it wasn\u2019t quite as slick and fast as most other tropical fish.\u00a0 The aerodynamics (or, more accurately, hydrodynamics) that stop it from going belly-up in the roughest of seas also make turning very hard.\u00a0 Boxfish have two other design features in place to help them survive the jungle of the coral reef that the Mercedes Benz doesn\u2019t have.\u00a0 The first makes up for the lack of manoeuvrability by having one heck of a defence system: it puts off minute amounts of poison into the water around it to deter predators \u2013 which is why it\u2019s bright yellow to send the message Toxic: Do Not Eat.\u00a0 The second feature is the way it moves its fins, which is what gives it the turning ability as well as adding to the stability.\u00a0 Just in case you haven\u2019t noticed, cars don\u2019t have fins and definitely don\u2019t use them for turning.\u00a0 This explains why the much-hyped Mercedes boxfish car didn\u2019t get beyond concept stage.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, biomimicry is still a very hot topic in the world of design in general, as we look for ways to make cars safer and more efficient.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s time to insist that all automotive designers need to have tropical fish tanks in their offices. http:\/\/credit-n.ru\/offers-zaim\/glavfinance-online-zaymi.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Right from the beginning of automotive history, car makers have named their creations after animals.\u00a0 The reasoning behind this is simple: by giving the vehicle the name of a creature that\u2019s fast, powerful, graceful or dangerous, the user will, at least subconsciously, feel that the vehicle shares those attributes.\u00a0 We want our cars to have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automotive-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9862"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11012,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9862\/revisions\/11012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}