Engineers Look to Fish Scales for Tough Materials
Engineering360 News Desk | January 27, 2017Fish scales may hold the key to developing flexible yet tough materials to protect workers in manufacturing settings.
Over a two-year period, researchers went through about 50 fish, puncturing or fracturing hundreds of fish scales under the microscope, to try to understand their properties and mechanics better.
An alligator gar.François Barthelat from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, looks to nature for inspiration to solve engineering problems.
He and his team worked to replicate the kind of protection combined with the flexibility offered by certain kinds of animal scales. Their goal is to create protective gloves that are both resistant to piercing and still flexible enough for factory workers to work in.
The solution came when they started looking more closely at the scales of an alligator gar.
Through a series of experiments, the researchers identified a set of critical mechanisms in the way natural fish scales deform, interact, and fracture. They also developed a technique to cover large surfaces with a shell of overlapping ceramic tiles. By using computer modeling, the researchers were able to determine the optimal size, shape, arrangement, and overlap to make protective gloves that are more resistant to piercing than those currently in use.
According to researchers, fish scales were surprising. They discovered that smaller scales are actually more difficult to pierce than the larger ones, something that can now be explained using engineering analysis. They also learned that fish scales are among the toughest collagen-based materials known.
What a marvellous theory this "evolution" is???
When one thinks of all the things that science has developed over the years by copying "nature".........and it all came about by chance.......I think not!
In reply to #1
Of course it is natural evolution. Those that didn't survive, didn't reproduce. Simple and quite elegant.
In reply to #5
It had to be created first. It's interesting how man tries to find out how things work or are made in nature and tries to copy it.
In reply to #5
O course it is your prerogative to believe in blind evolution and believe that theory to be factual........I on the other hand believe in a wise creator who knew exactly what he was doing.
I would also like to add that I am not a "creationist" who believes the creation occurred in 6 x 24 hour days........I believe that each of those creative periods lasted thousands of years, culminating in the creation of humans toward the end of that sixth creative period.
In reply to #7
We don't seem to have made any advancements in morals, ethics, honesty or any effort to save ourselves from self destruction since the sixth day.
Designers rarely get credit for their designs.
In reply to #2
How true that is.
Its quite true that person who imagines the design conceive and bring it to daylight rarely gets the credit.
And of course the deserved value too.