The amount of biological knowledge increases significantly from year to year, or as we like to say, the biologists' research cellars are overflowing with research information, information that with an applied/business point of view can turn into biomimetic projects and even products.
By: Dafna Haim-Langford
A glimpse of the seam between the biological research and its application as a biomimetic application can be seen in the German study published in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.
The research deals with the ability of different plants to absorb oils from the point of departure that as long as humanity consumes oil for a variety of uses (the estimated rate of consumption for 2016 reached 94 million barrels of oil per day!), we are exposed to threats of oil spills as a result of accidents in the processes of oil exploration, transportation, and storage And of course his exploitation. These accidents require us to deal quickly and efficiently with contamination from oil stains and various oils in the sea and other water sources.
On the one hand, the researchers base their research on previous studies of the oil absorption properties of different plant leaves. On the other hand, they examine the effectiveness of artificial adsorbents. Although artificial oil absorbents have a high oil absorbent capacity, they produce secondary environmental pollution by virtue of being foreign to the natural environment. The goal of the researchers in the two-way research is to create a bridge between the oil-absorbing biological materials and the oil-absorbing artificial materials in order to improve the artificial materials through the assimilation of natural models and structures in these materials.
One of the plants studied is the salvia (Salvina Molesta). as is known from previous studies, the salvia leaves (Salvina Molesta) are super-hydrophobic ("water haters"), but in addition, they are also "oil lovers" and therefore can selectively adsorb oil and not water. This property is optimal for an environmentally friendly oil absorbent. The researchers compared the oil absorption capacity of several aquatic plants such as Pistia Stratiotes ו Nelumbo Nocifera to that of the artificial adsorbents. It turns out that the absorption capacity of the plants does not fall short of that of the artificial materials, but of course exceeds them in the environmental index. Encouraged by the results, the researchers continued to examine the adsorption capacities of oils at different levels of viscosity and density and the relationship between the morphology of the plant's mammals (trichomes) on the efficiency of adsorption.
At this stage, the scientific bridge was actually built between the existing engineering knowledge for the artificial oil absorption materials and the morphological basis for the oil absorption of different aquatic plants. The fact that the research was based on many years of research knowledge about the morphology of plants with super-hydrophobic properties, helped shorten the biomimetic research process and advance it to the stage of applying the biological elements in the engineering process. Now the researchers are moving to the next stage of integrating the biological insights into the artificial models in order to reduce the environmental impact of the oil absorbents without compromising the speed and efficiency of the absorption during an accident.
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Professor Michael Margaliot MAAT and Professor Tamir Toler who studied electrical engineering and is now at the Faculty of Biomedicine Tel Aviv
They are examples of electrical and electronics engineering professors who use complex control knowledge: non-linear, optimal, robust, stochastic for the field of biology. Tools that were not previously studied in biology, but yes in electrical and electronics engineering. That's why you see engineering professors who lead research groups in biology.