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What Can Be Learnt from Ageing in Biology and Damage-Tolerant Biological Structures for Long-Lasting Biomimetic Materials?

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The Ageing of Materials and Structures

Abstract

Ageing in biology and the principles of how living beings deal with shortcomings occurring during ageing on the structural and functional level are exemplified. The presented examples mainly focus on damage repair and damage tolerance in biological materials and structures, and on what can be learnt for ageing man-made materials and structures by using bio-inspired approaches. The potential of such an approach is specified by three examples comprising biomimetic self-repairing foam coatings for pneumatic structures, bio-inspired self-healing elastomers and biomimetic damage-tolerant fibre-reinforced gradient foams with high-energy dissipation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our colleagues and their research groups for excellent cooperation during the projects presented above, especially Andreas Bührig-Polaczek (RWTH Aachen), Claudia Fleck (TU Berlin), Rolf Luchsinger (EMPA Dübendorf), Rolf Mülhaupt (University of Freiburg and FMF) and Anke Nellessen (Fraunhofer Institute UMSICHT Oberhausen). We also thank Martin Köhn (University of Freiburg) for the permission to use his skull collection for making pictures. For financial support, we are grateful to (1) the German Research Foundation (DFG) for funding within the priority program 1420 “Biomimetic Materials Research: Functionality by Hierarchical Structuring of Materials” and within the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 141 “Biological Design and Integrative Structures”, (2) to the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research for funding within the scope of the programme BIONA and the within the scope of the funding programme “Ideenwettbewerb: Bionik—Innovationen aus der Natur”, and (3) to the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg in the framework of the “Sustainability Center Freiburg”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Botany: Functional Morphology & Biomimetics, Faculty of Biology, Botanic Garden of the University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

    Thomas Speck, Marc Thielen & Olga Speck

  2. Freiburg Materials Research Center (FMF), Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

    Thomas Speck & Marc Thielen

  3. Freiburg Center for Interactive Materials and Bioinspired Technologies (FIT), Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

    Thomas Speck & Olga Speck

  4. Networks of Competence Biomimetics, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Thomas Speck & Olga Speck

Authors
  1. Thomas Speck
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  2. Marc Thielen
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  3. Olga Speck
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Correspondence to Thomas Speck .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Klaas van Breugel

  2. Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Dessi Koleva

  3. Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Ton van Beek

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Speck, T., Thielen, M., Speck, O. (2018). What Can Be Learnt from Ageing in Biology and Damage-Tolerant Biological Structures for Long-Lasting Biomimetic Materials?. In: van Breugel, K., Koleva, D., Beek, T. (eds) The Ageing of Materials and Structures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70194-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70194-3_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70192-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70194-3

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