Biology into Engineering

All organisms assemble themselves; no engineering components do.  If some engineering components and assemblies could be made more like organisms in this respect, then that would have a significant impact upon production speed and capacity, and also upon the achievable complexity of those components and assemblies.  It might also allow a certain amount of self-repair.  This work is about methods for getting one- two- and three-dimensional micron-scale structures made from polymer beads to assemble themselves. The aim of the work is not to make regular repeating structures like crystals, but rather to make predetermined designable structures that will form a basis for micro-engineering.

Click here for our technical report on automatic manufacture at the micron scale.

and see

Adrian Bowyer, David Eisenthal, Robert Eisenthal, Ignatius Gyepi-Garbrah, John Hubble, & William Whish: Self-assembly of micron-scale polymer structures using biochemical recognition. IMechE J. Eng. Manuf., v214, no. B8, pp755-758, 2000.

The purpose of this project is to make a collection of small robots that will build three-dimensional structures in a similar way to the manner in which the social insects construct their nests.  The project will concentrate on getting the robots to build the two fundamental structures of civil engineering---the wall and the arch---on a scale useful to people, that is with typical dimensions of about two meters.

Click here for a preliminary technical report on getting robots to build like termites.

We are making gel membranes that change their diffusivity to one substance (for example, insulin) in response to the presence of another (for example, glucose).  These changes are reversible.  Our experiments should lead to a family of materials with a wide range of applications from medicine to sensor technology.

Click here for preliminary details.

This is just a brief article I wrote on the biological aspects of emerging production technologies.

Click here to read it.