Biomimetic Design Methods—Literature Review

Abstract

This chapter presents a detailed literature review on the state of the art biomimetic design methods, including major approaches, methodologies, and tools to support the core stages of the biomimetic design process: Biological system search, abstraction, and transfer. Searching methods include searching in biomimetic databases or general biological databases. We present current biomimetic databases, organized by biological systems or bio-inspired products and elaborate on searching techniques in general biological databases by keywords, heuristics or functional thesauruses. Abstraction methods include various modelling approaches such as functional modelling, C-K, SBF, TRIZ based modelling and more. The transfer part is less developed and is mainly performed by comparing the biomimetic concept with the biological model.