NEW YORK – The Beetle’s armor allows it to withstand bird pecking, animal footfalls, and even the weight of a Toyota Camry that runs over it. Now scientists are studying that armor in the hope that it offers ideas for designing stronger buildings and airplanes.
“These beetles are extremely tough,” said Purdue University civil engineer Pablo Zavattieri, part of a group of researchers who ran over the bug with a car as part of a new study.
How does this nearly indestructible insect handle those weights? The species features complex armor that looks like a puzzle, according to the study by Zavattieri and his colleagues, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. Its design, they say, could inspire more durable structures and vehicles.
To understand what makes this two-and-a-half-centimeter (one-inch) insect so tough, the researchers first tested how much pressure they could withstand. Some withstood a compression equivalent to 39,000 times the weight of the animal. Others gave up a third of that weight.
The researchers then used electron microscopes and scanners to examine the outer skeleton and try to determine what makes it so tough.
As is often the case with beetles, the elytra – a protective layer on the wings – get tougher and tougher over time. Up close, scientists realized that the shell benefited from a layered, edged structure that looks like a puzzle.
When compressed, they found that the structure was slowly cracking, instead of breaking at one.
“When you loosen up,” Zavattieri said, “it doesn’t disarm. It just warps a little bit. That is fundamental ”.
The study could be useful to engineers who design airplanes and other vehicles out of materials such as steel, plastic and plaster. Engineers now use pins, screws, solder, and adhesives to put everything together. But these techniques can deteriorate.
In the structure of the scarab’s armor, nature offers an “interesting and elegant” alternative, says Zavattieri.
Because beetle-inspired designs gradually and predictably crack, it is easier to examine cracks to determine the condition of a part, according to Po-Yu Chen, an engineer at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University, who is not involved in the study. the investigation.
The beetle study is part of an $ 8 million US Air Force project exploring how the biology of creatures like the mantis lobster and mouflon can generate materials that resist impacts.
“We try to go beyond what nature has done,” said study co-author David Kisailus, an engineer at the University of California, Irvine.
The research is a new effort to seek solutions to human problems in nature, according to biologist Colin Donihue, who is not involved in the study. Velcro, for example, was inspired by a structure in the spiny bark of some plants. The artificial stickers were copied from the gecko’s sticky legs.
Donihue said that there are a number of things in nature that can help. “These adaptations are the product of millennia of evolution.”
– .
