New, safe packaging metal draws inspiration from strength of pomelo fruit

[Reefa]

Biomimetics is the practice of emulating nature to achieve some goal in engineering. It’s based on the idea that evolution, with the billions of years it has had to invent and refine ideas, has come up with all kinds of solutions we could stand to learn. This often comes on the largest and the smallest scales, copying whole body plans for robot movement strategies, and molecular structures for non-slip coatings and the like. But now, something in between: a new packaging material is being designed after the pomelo fruit.

In particular, the packaging material is being designed after the rind of the pomelo. Despite being quite heavy for fruit, often topping two kilograms, pomelo have to survive falls from as high as 10 meters to most effectively deliver their seeds. As a result, the soft and squishable meat of the fruit is protected with a thick, spongy outer peel. A regular supermarket orange has a peel that’s perhaps five millimeters thick; a pomelo’s can be inches thick, and account of a huge proportion of its overall size.

That fall protection is essentially packaging science — and we do packaging science already. So researchers from several universities in Germany looked at the pomelo fruit for inspiration. The peel is essentially a foam, reinforced with strong fiber molecules. The high tensile strength of one of its components keeps it strong, while the ductile components keep it flexible and able to take deformation. On a microscopic level, it seems to resemble the matrix structures of lightweight packaging materials.

Safety materials are the most likely application for this sort of technology.

In particular, aluminum materials that use much the same overall structure but can’t match the humble pomelo’s combination of toughness, flexibility, and weight. By mimicking the pomelo’s combination of packaging materials, the researchers were able to improve their metal’s performance. Pure aluminum at the center of their composite keeps the structure ductile and movable, while a strengthened aluminum-silicon alloy keeps it strong.

Why care so much about a pomelo’s durability? Well, our closest human analog to the falling fruit is a crashing car — and having strong but highly compressible packaging materials is certainly important in that context. A cheap, reliable, and above all lightweight packing material could also be a big boon to the nascent drone delivery industry, cushioning the inevitable drops and bumps, causing fewer breakages and missed deliveries.

In this case, bio-inspired design can led to a new sort of packing material.

Source:http://www.geek.com/news/new-packaging-metal-draws-inspiration-from-fruit-1565508/