It has been a long time since my last post but October has been a very busy month, with a lot of travelling!
- Towards the end of September I had a short 1-day training session at Hollomet GmbH in Dresden in the processing of hollow spheres. There I had the opportunity to create steel hollow sphere monolayers, bonded with thermosetting araldite epoxy! This was the first opportunity I had with processing steel hollow spheres and got plenty of useful advice on how to create my moulds. Furthermore I had the opportunity to see first hand the pilot production plant at Hollomet, how steel hollow spheres are produced and what quality assurance checks take place.
- Early in October, I had the opportunity for the first time since my first dealings with Biomimicry to visit the "Mothership"! The Biomimicry Institute and Biomimicry 3.8 organised the Biomimicry Education Summit and the Biomimicry track at the SXSW Eco conference in Austin TX. At the 8th Annual Biomimicry, I presented how we used our research in Biomimicry in a teaching workshop for postgraduate students in Civil and Environmental Engineering courses at Imperial College London initially and how that evolved as part of the Integrated Design Course in Civil Engineering and Geomatics at the Cyprus University of Technology, Last but not least I highlighted the ways Biomimicry is playing a role in the development of INSIST. You can download a copy of the presentation below.
sy_biosummit_print.pdf |
- The presentation was well attended by educators, architects, designers and biomimicry experts and very good feedback was obtained. The summit ended with the Biomimicry Design Challenge Finals, where students from all over the world exhibited their biomimetic ideas for cleantech innovations, highlighting the potential, Biomimicry as a methodology can have in research, development and design. Finally I had the opportunity to place Cyprus (my home country) on the global map of Biomimicry!
- For the following 3 days we reconvened at the Austin Convention Centre where the SXSW Eco conference was taking place, One of the biggest conferences of its kind attracting scientists, entrepreneurs, investors and policy stakeholders from all over the world
- At SXSW I mainly followed the Biomimicry track , but also attended some other interesting keynotes by Chris Lewicki on mining asteroids and Dirk Ahlborn on disrupting the transportation industry with Hyperloop.
- The Biomimicry track opened in a packed room with the most iconic figure who coined the term Biomimicry almost 20 years ago. Janine Benyus gave a fantastic keynote on the evolution of Biomimicry and its positive outlook of the future. What followed was a series of great talks and panel discussions where I had the opportunity to network and get up to date with all the developments in the Biomimetic methodology and education as well as forge links with Biomimicry networks both in the Americas and Europe. Last but not least I had the opportunity to get to introduce myself to Janine getting my book signed by her!
- Back to Cranfield, things started moving in full throttle! The testing rig has been procured and should be arriving soon. The steel hollow spheres arrived from Hollomet GmbH in Germany and I had a go at making my first steel foam and steel foam sandwich samples. My mould will require some more work, but the first effort is very promising and once it has been optimized and streamlined, the production of the necessary samples will improve massively.
That's all the news for now as I have to return to the lab and "bake" some more metal foam samples! In my next post I hope I will have some more pictures to share!