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一个宝库，提供了可持续性、弹性和有效利用稀缺资源的巧妙解决方案。自然启发工程中心将从自然中汲取教训，设计出创新的解决方案，以应对我们在能源、水、材料、健康和生活空间方面的巨大挑战。该中心的研究将采用绝对科学的方法来揭示潜在的理想特征的基本机制，并将这些机制应用于设计和合成人工系统，而不是脱离背景地模仿自然或屈服于肤浅的类比。该中心最初将侧重于三个关键机制，因为它们在本质上是如此普遍，易于实际实施，并有望对可持续性和可扩展制造业的紧迫问题产生变革性影响。这些机制是：（T1）“分层运输网络”：大自然将微观到宏观的长度尺度连接起来，以保持整个复杂的微观或细胞功能（如树木、肺和循环系统）；（T2）“力平衡”：平衡使用基本力，例如静电吸引/斥力和微观空间中的几何约束（如细胞膜中的蛋白质通道，在选择性、高渗透分离性能方面优于人工膜）；(3)“动态自组织”：由于集体合作和从更简单的个体成分（如细菌群落和生化循环）中产生复杂结构，创造了强大的、适应性强的和自愈的群落。这种受自然启发的方法，而不是狭隘的仿生学方法，使我们能够将先进的制造能力和非生理条件与自然的多用途机制结合起来，而这些机制很少以理性、定制的方式使用。高性能计算和实验现在使我们能够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，并指导自然灵感设计的实际实现。首先，将开发三个例子来验证上述每种自然机制，并同时将其应用于与能源，水，材料和可扩展制造等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，通过使用肺部启发的结构，大大减少了珍贵催化剂的数量；(2)受生物细胞膜机制启发的海水淡化膜；(3)高性能功能材料，如：建筑设计（城市，建筑物），以细菌为灵感的基于主体的建模为依据。人类社区，以确定通往强大、适应性强的复杂系统的道路。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，从化学和生物化学工程到计算机科学、建筑、材料、化学和遗传学。中心的研究人员与各行各业的工业伙伴合作，并向他们征求意见，从而加快了实际实施。该中心具有开放、外向的心态，邀请伦敦大学学院核心以外的更广泛的合作。它将投入大量资源，探索在其他应用中使用经过验证的自然启发机制，并将调查扩展到其他自然机制，这些机制可能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.