All articles by Waseem Ahmed
Wingless flight: Flying snake
Flying has been man’s fantasy for ages, attempts we made as early as late 1800’s. Otto Lilienthal of Germany was the first one with a successful glider flight in the 1890. In the previous articles for this theme session we have read about the dynamic soaring, gliding. Today I would like to discuss some unusual...
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Electricity: Engineers POV
A couple of weeks ago I introduced the theme electricity. For this week’s, I will look at the topic from an engineer’s point of view and evaluate the topic in a top down approach. Despite many positive signs, there are still key challenges that must be tackled to boost renewable electricity production and reduce our...
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Theme session: Electricity
Welcome back readers. Hope all of you had a great summer vacation. We start with a new theme ‘Electricity’. We humans are very familiar with the term electricity, because we are surrounded by it. Electricity is powering most of our technology from our cell phones, computers, lights, soldering irons, and so on to basic amenities...
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Mimicking salt filtration membranes in nature, Technical Implementation
After learning about how the plant kingdom keeps salt out and how fish deal with high salt concentrations, I would like to discuss how it affects us humans. All throughout the history the availability of salt has been important to civilization. As a matter of fact the word salary come from the Latin word for...
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Energy Storage: Engineer’s POV
Energy storage has remained a topic of interest for the last decade. But why is there a sudden need for energy storage? Finite amount of fossil fuels and environmental concerns have forced us to look for more renewable sources of energy. As the world has begun its slow transition from fossil fuels, it is important...
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How environmental factors influence material properties in wood
For the theme session of WOOD, we will discuss the properties of tree wood and factors which influence these properties. Wood is a natural composite that exhibits a remarkable combination of strength, stiffness and toughness [1]. At the same time being a natural/organic product, it is a structure of infinite variation of detail and design. It is...
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Biomimetics Inspires Functional Surfaces which are Efficient and Sustainable
Over the last few decades, knowledge transfer from biological concepts to generate technical applications has been receiving increasing attention, often inspiring sustainable biomimetic products in the process. In the past weeks, we have discussed about multiple functional surfaces and how they can be implemented into technical applications. For the theme of surfaces, I will discuss...
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Surfaces: our 3rd theme session
Greetings readers, a very happy new year. In our third theme session, we are going to discuss about surfaces. The year started with big news on functional surfaces. Scientists of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a new process to achieve functional surfaces, this process so far was irreversible (1). This provides a...
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Secrets of Ice and what we can learn from it
For the theme of ice, I am going to talk about ice itself and how it occurs in nature. Ice is one of the phases of water, almost one tenth of our planet is covered with it. Two large sheets of ice are covering almost the entire Antarctic and Greenland, this amounts to approximately 15 million square kilometers,...
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Light Harvesting in Nature
Greetings Readers, For the theme of light, I am going to discuss how nature harvests light. We have discussed in one of our previous articles, how polar bears use light reflection and scattering (similar to fiber optics) for light absorption, but sophisticated light harvesting strategies this mechanism is not only limited to animals. Light Harvesting in Polar...
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In Conversation With a Physicist
Greetings readers! Hope you are having a great summer so far. I want to start with important question; why should we use biomimetics? We have often told you that we should learn from nature and use the solutions offered by nature for problem solving. But some of you might ask, though nature is smart, can...
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Getting to know… Us!
Hello readers, Woooo hoooo, we survived for a year! 😛 For the anniversary week, I thought! What could bring the authors and readers to better understand each other? We have written a lot about our backgrounds and our articles reflect our individuality. Though we have studied together we come from different scientific fields, different...
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Structural Mechanics in Biomimetics
Greetings readers, in my article today I am going to talk about structural mechanics and where in nature we can find examples for it. Biomimetics being a multi-disciplinary study enables the flexibility http://www.blogionik.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=1348&action=editto choose the topic of interest. During my study of Biomimetics, we had a unique mix of students coming both from biology and engineering....
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‚Temperature regulation in plants and animals‘– An Engineers Point of view
One week ago my colleague Anja spoke about temperature regulation in plants and animals. Temperature regulation in plants and animals. I would like to follow up on that topic and relate how technical implementations of some of those principles could look like. Heating and cooling systems are quite prominent these days. We humans have conquered both...
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Communication in nature.
Last week my colleague Jan was writing about sensors. Today I would like to relate to that topic and discuss communication in nature. How do organisms communicate? Human beings for instance rely on verbal communication along with many other channels like hand gestures, behavior, facial expressions etc. Other animals are also using several different methods...
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Multi-functional designs in nature !!
In my last article I spoke about the diversity of Biomimetics and how it can inspire sustainable living. In today’s article I want to discuss about how good design in nature is along with being multi-functional. We are all aware that nature offers many multi-functional materials, the most known material being our skin. Skin performs...
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Diversity in Biomimetics – How it can inspire sustainable living
New Year’s greetings to our readers. So far, me and my colleagues have written about many different topics, organisms, complex systems, but where can one actually apply the knowledge gained from Biomimetics? The answer is: „Everywhere!“. In this article I will discuss the diversity of Biomimetics and how we can contribute to a sustainable living. The...
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Natural Materials – II
Wood and cotton!! How similar are they ? In the last article of natural materials I wrote about woodpeckers and seashells, but there a lot more natural materials which we come in contact with in everyday life. One of the most common one being wood, there are many forms of it and all of them exist in nature as composite material....
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Natural Materials: Wood peckers and sea shells
Natural materials!! As the name suggests it refers to materials which are made by nature like silk, wood, leather etc, But what are they good for? Do they have unique properties which we can learn from? The answer is yes! Natural materials possess many good qualities like strength, toughness, crack resistance, fire resistance and self...
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How bats see in the dark ?
Biomimetics!! The name sounds a bit like science fiction doesn’t it!! Well it simply means the application of natural principles in engineering and technical systems. Like most of you would react I was also a bit curious, as of what this study field is about, and how does it work to take something from nature...
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Why I choose biomimetics and what it means to me
Fast cars, massive engines and smart machines, this is all I was interested as a teenager, so were most of the kids in my neighborhood. As an obvious choice I choose mechanical engineering as the next logical step based on my prior interests. Four years ago after graduating as a mechanical engineer I was faced...
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