(336g) Nature-Inspired Chemical Engineering – Pathways to Innovation and Sustainability

Some of the most urgent challenges facing us today are related to energy, lack of fresh water, and how to translate discoveries at the nanoscale to macroscopically relevant scales for practical applications, as in scalable manufacturing.

My presentation will give a brief overview of our nature-inspired chemical engineering (NICE) approach, which addresses these challenges by a rigorous approach that takes guidance from Nature. In particular, we seek to discover fundamental mechanisms (rather than imitation out of context) behind desirable traits in natural systems – like scalability, robustness and efficiency – and use this insight to guide the design and synthesis of engineered systems that have the same properties.

Particularly promising for innovation are three fundamental and ubiquitous natural mechanisms, which we see as most timely for exploration: hierarchical transport networks (such as in lungs and trees), force balancing (e.g., steric vs. electrostatic effects), and dynamic self-organisation (as in regular pattern formation induced by perturbations, and emergence of robust properties as a result of collective phenomena behind much simpler entities).

The NICE methodology allows us to discover innovative solutions to technological problems. In my presentation, I will illustrate this thematic approach via a few examples, e.g., how the structure of trees and leaves guides the design of fractal fluid distributors and hierarchically structured catalysts; how chaperones present us with ideas on how to stabilize enzymes for therapeutics; and how bacterial communities teach us lessons on how to design adaptive, robust materials.

Taking ideas from biology to architecture, and cognizant of the context in product and process design as a boundary condition to engineering practical solutions, nature-inspired chemical engineering brings the humanities back to engineering.