Bioinspired veins provide structure, transport fluids in foamed polymersMany lessons learned in life
Bioinspired veins provide structure, transport fluids in foamed polymersMany lessons learned in life are learned from trees. Stand firm. Good things take time. Bend, don’t break. But metaphors aside, our stately arboreal neighbors offer a wealth of scientific wisdom—and we have a lot to learn.Simply by existing, trees are nature’s first materials scientists. Like many plants, they have vascular systems, networks of tube-like channels that transport water and other vital nutrients from root, to branch, to leaf.A research team at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology developed a chemical process to create foamed polymers with vascular systems of their own, controlling the direction and alignment of the hollow channels to provide structural support and efficiently move fluids through the material.Their work, “Anisotropic foams via frontal polymerization,” was published in Advanced Materials.Read more. -- source link
#materials science#science#biomimicry#polymers#fluid dynamics