Inspired by nature — The Art of Biomimicry

Photos by Damir Perge, all rights reserved, 2012 (Note: photos taken with iPhone with lighting provided by Mother Nature at no charge. Location: Dallas, Texas USA.)

I have always been inspired by Mother Nature. I don't understand some people at times — the ones that are not inspired by nature to the point of being haters. Mother Nature can be revolutionary, innovative, disruptive and quite profitable for your business. It amazes me when humans do not give credit to Mother Nature. Recently, there has been an incredible amount of positive and negative publicity surrounding 13-year-old Aidan Dwyer. Aidan was inspired by secrets provided by nature when he was 11-years old and he might have just started another energy revolution. He looked at the structure of tree branches and wondered whether their design might enable a better platform for capturing sunlight.

From complexity science perspective, trees are fractal in nature and fractals exist throughout nature. A fractal is rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity.¹

For instance, when you look at the geometry of a coastline, fractals are evident at any level you might look at from the high above or closer to the ground. In other words, fractal is a form or geometry where re-occurring patterns happen at different levels.

Other fractals are easily found in nature. These objects display self-similar structure over an extended, but finite, scale range. Examples include clouds, river networks, fault lines, mountain ranges, craters, snowflakes, crystals, lightning, cauliflower or broccoli, and systems of blood vessels and pulmonary vessels, and ocean waves. DNA and heartbeat can be analyzed as fractals.

Trees and ferns are fractal in nature and can be modeled on a computer by using a recursive algorithm. This recursive nature is obvious in these examples—a branch from a tree or a frond from a fern is a miniature replica of the whole: not identical, but similar in nature. The connection between fractals and leaves is currently being used to determine how much carbon is contained in trees.²

It was a simple observation by the youngster. He was just curious, never dreaming that it would start off a scientific debate on a massive global scale. His curiosity turned into a project and he saved up enough money, to the tune of $75, to make a prototype of his solar model by mimicking the secrets of the trees. In other words, he used the concepts of what in science is called biomimicry and patterned his solar design after the branch sequence of an oak tree.

To prove his idea, Aiden compared his tree solar prototype to a traditional flat-panel array and found out that his design had produced better measurements. He submitted his results to the Young Naturalist Awards, a national contest run by the American Museum of Natural History. There were 700 entries and he ended up being one of the 12 winners. MORE

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