Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering (CNIE): Addressing Challenges in Sustainability and Scalable Manufacturing

亿万年的进化使大自然成为可持续发展、弹性和有效利用稀缺资源的聪明解决方案的宝库。以自然为灵感的工程中心将从自然中吸取教训，设计创新的解决方案，以应对我们在能源、水、材料、健康和生活空间方面的重大挑战。该中心的研究不是断章取义地模仿自然，也不是屈从于肤浅的类比，而是采取绝对科学的方法来揭示理想特征背后的基本机制，并应用这些机制来设计和合成人工系统，借此借用自然模型的特征。该中心最初将侧重于三个关键机制，因为它们在性质上非常普遍，易于实际执行，预计将对可持续性和可扩展制造方面的紧迫问题产生变革性的影响。这些机制是：(T1)“分层传输网络”：自然界将微观尺度连接到宏观长度尺度的方式，以便在整个过程中保持复杂的微观或细胞功能(如在树木、肺部和循环系统中)；(T2)“力平衡”：平衡使用基本力，例如，静电吸引/排斥和微观空间中的几何限制(如细胞膜中的蛋白质通道，在选择性、高渗透分离性能方面胜过人造膜)；和(T3)“动态自组织”：由于集体合作和从简单得多的个体成分中出现复杂结构(如在细菌群落和生化循环中)，创建强大、适应和自我修复的社区。这种以自然为灵感的方法，而不是狭隘的仿生方法，使我们能够将先进的制造能力和获得非生理条件的机会与自然的多功能机制结合起来，而这些机制在理性的、定制的方式中使用得非常少。高性能计算和实验现在允许我们以前所未有的方式解开从原子到宏观的基本机制，提供超越经验主义所需的信息，并指导受自然启发的设计的实际实现。首先，将开发三个例子来验证上述每一种自然机制，并同时将它们应用于与能源、水、材料和可扩展制造方面的重大挑战相关的直接相关问题。它们是：(1)坚固、高性能的燃料电池，通过使用受肺启发的架构，极大地减少了贵重催化剂的用量；(2)基于生物细胞膜机制的水淡化膜；(3)高性能功能材料。建筑设计(城市、建筑)，以细菌为灵感的基于代理的建模，分别。为了实现这些雄心勃勃的目标，该中心组建了一个跨学科的专家团队，从化学和生化工程到计算机科学、建筑、材料、化学和遗传学。该中心的研究人员与来自广泛行业的行业合作伙伴合作，并向其寻求建议，从而加快了实际实施。该中心具有开放、外向的心态，邀请在伦敦大学学院核心之外开展更广泛的合作。它将投入大量资源，探索将经过验证的自然启发机制应用于其他应用，并将调查扩展到其他自然机制，这些机制可能会为可持续性和可扩展制造中的问题提供解决方案。

Evolution over the eons has made Nature a treasure trove of clever solutions to sustainability, resilience, and ways to efficiently utilize scarce resources. The Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering will draw lessons from nature to engineer innovative solutions to our grand challenges in energy, water, materials, health, and living space. Rather than imitating nature out of context or succumbing to superficial analogies, research at the Centre will take a decidedly scientific approach to uncover fundamental mechanisms underlying desirable traits, and apply these mechanisms to design and synthesise artificial systems that hereby borrow the traits of the natural model. The Centre will initially focus on three key mechanisms, as they are so prevalent in nature, amenable to practical implementation, and are expected to have transformational impact on urgent issues in sustainability and scalable manufacturing. These mechanisms are: (T1) "Hierarchical Transport Networks": the way nature bridges microscopic to macroscopic length scales in order to preserve the intricate microscopic or cellular function throughout (as in trees, lungs and the circulatory system); (T2) "Force Balancing": the balanced use of fundamental forces, e.g., electrostatic attraction/repulsion and geometrical confinement in microscopic spaces (as in protein channels in cell membranes, which trump artificial membranes in selective, high-permeation separation performance); and (T3) "Dynamic Self-Organisation": the creation of robust, adaptive and self-healing communities thanks to collective cooperation and emergence of complex structures out of much simpler individual components (as in bacterial communities and in biochemical cycles). Such nature-inspired, rather than narrowly biomimetic approach, allows us to marry advanced manufacturing capabilities and access to non-physiological conditions, with nature's versatile mechanisms that have been remarkably little employed in a rational, bespoke manner. High-performance computing and experimentation now allow us to unravel fundamental mechanisms, from the atomic to the macroscopic, in an unprecedented way, providing the required information to transcend empiricism, and guide practical realisations of nature-inspired designs. In first instance, three examples will be developed to validate each of the aforementioned natural mechanisms, and simultaneously apply them to problems of immediate relevance that tie in to the Grand Challenges in energy, water, materials and scalable manufacturing. These are: (1) robust, high-performance fuel cells with greatly reduced amount of precious catalyst, by using a lung-inspired architecture; (2) membranes for water desalination inspired by the mechanism of biological cell membranes; (3) high-performance functional materials, resp. architectural design (cities, buildings), informed by agent-based modelling on bacteria-inspired, resp. human communities, to identify roads to robust, adaptive complex systems.To meet these ambitious goals, the Centre assembles an interdisciplinary team of experts, from chemical and biochemical engineering, to computer science, architecture, materials, chemistry and genetics. The Centre researchers collaborate with, and seek advice from industrial partners from a wide range of industries, which accelerates practical implementation. The Centre has an open, outward looking mentality, inviting broader collaboration beyond the core at UCL. It will devote significant resources to explore the use of the validated nature-inspired mechanisms to other applications, and extend investigation to other natural mechanisms that may inform solutions to problems in sustainability and scalable manufacturing.