(274e) Leveraging Nature’s Mechanisms to Design Solutions to Engineering Challenges

Nature presents us with superior, if not optimal, evolved solutions to crucial properties, such as efficiency, scalability and resilience. Decoding these solutions can help us address similar problems in chemical engineering and interdisciplinary areas, where transformative technology is required to address pressing challenges in resource efficiency, energy, water, environment or health. However, because the context of nature and technology often differ, direct biomimicry based on superficial similarities does not guarantee an effective solution. A nature-inspired solution methodology will be presented that first draws from fundamental mechanisms underpinning desired properties, grouped thematically based on universal characteristics. It then applies these abstracted, nature-inspired concepts to design solutions to technological challenges with suitable adaptations to account for the different, concrete environment. We group our solutions according to four themes, based on ubiquitous fundamental mechanisms in nature: (1) hierarchical transport networks, (2) force balancing and nano-confinement, (3) dynamic self-organization, and (4) ecosystems, networks and modularity. This fundamentally grounded design approach allows us to systematize the discovery of new solutions to a range of chemical engineering problems related to process intensification (an approach we call NICE or nature-inspired chemical engineering)¹, but it is also apt to address problems in developmental bioengineering² and biomedical engineering³. An example is cancer immunotherapy⁴. As enabling properties in nature often result from emergent, complex systems behavior, we advocate a holistic, systems-based approach, departing from the usual reductionistic bottom-up or top-down approaches.

1. M-O. Coppens, 2021, Nature-inspired chemical engineering for process intensification. Ann. Rev. Chem. Biomolec. Eng. 12. DOI:10.1146/annurev-chembioeng-060718-030249.
2. E.C. Goldfield and M.-O. Coppens, 2020, Developmental bioengineering: Recapitulating development for repair. Molec. Sys. Design Eng. 5, 1168-1180.
3. A.S. Perera and M.-O. Coppens, 2018, Re-designing materials for biomedical applications: From biomimicry to nature-inspired chemical engineering. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A. 377(2138):20180268.
4. M.H.W. Chin, E. Gentleman, M.-O. Coppens and R. Day, 2020, Rethinking cancer immunotherapy by embracing and engineering complexity. Trends in Biotechnology. 38(10), 1054-1065.