Introduction

Building on the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (the 2030 Agenda) is a set of international development goals to be met by 2030, adopted by the UN Sustainable Development Summit held in September 2015.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be the impetus for change as the manufacturing and processing industries around the world are in need of new technology for the development of environmentally-friendly materials and processes. For that purpose, it is indispensable to realize low-energy and highly efficient manufacturing. Living things have a special technology for this aim.

In recent years, researchers have been expanding their work on biomimetic engineering (biomimetics), a field focused on introducing high efficiency and performance biofunctions into material design.^[²^-⁶^] Biofunction is a development in engineering technology that elucidates the processes of activities related to the functions and life phenomena of animals, plants, and microorganisms, and makes them useful in real life. More and more articles on biomimetic engineering have been reported every year, and expectations that the industry will develop practical applications for such are likewise on the rise. Numerous well-known applications of biomimetics can be cited, e.g. self-cleaning paints based on lotus leaves, easy-to-peel-off tapes inspired by the microstructures in the soles of a gecko's foot, nonreflective films structured like the compound eyes of a moth, shark skin-patterned high-speed swimwear, automobile designs that incorporate ideas taken from a boxfish's skeleton, and labels that use the structural colours of the morpho butterfly. The ranks of companies whose interest in developing materials based on biomimetic engineering principles sparked by news reports about such developments likewise has been increasing.^[²^] There are more than 7,8 million species of living beings in the world, with an enormous number of distinct functions and behaviours. Whatever biofunction attracts our attention, it is unclear as to which ones will be useful toward developing innovative technologies and materials and lead to an optimal material design. In short, most engineers and researchers are challenged by their inability to focus on a single target owing to the excess of options. Thus, case-by-case material design is the mainstream in biomimetic engineering today. Only a portion of the limitless number of biofunctions are being put to use, and there are no effective means for extracting those technological elements that may be necessary. Furthermore, with ISO/TC 266 currently studying a variety of regulations regarding biomimetic engineering, there is demand for biomimetic products to be created that conform to international standards. According to ISO 18458, developing biomimetic biometric products requires they go through the following process: (1) identify issues with existing technologies and materials, (2) search for biofunctions that can resolve those issues, (3) extract and generalize the principles behind the biofunctions that have been discovered, and (4) create and optimize new technologies and materials. The question also arises of the best approach to take for identifying the functions among the 7,8 million living things said to exist and for optimizing them. This document introduces the database that will support the creation of biomimetics products according to ISO 18458.

PD ISO/TR 23847:2022

Biomimetics. Integrating problem and function-oriented approaches applying the TRIZ method

Current

Published:

28 Feb 2023