ABSTRACT
The high-level integration of form, structure and function inherent to living nature very often results from the astonishing versatility of fibrous systems. This is even more remarkable if one considers that most of these biological systems consist of a small range of materials only, as it suggests that nature organises material in a highly effective manner. Professor Dr George Jeronimidis, director of the Centre of Biomimetics at the University of Reading, posited:
Biology makes use of remarkably few materials, and nearly all loads are carried by fibrous composites. There are only four polymer fibres: cellulose in plants, collagen in animals, chitin in insects and crustaceans and silks in spider’s webs. These are the basic materials of biology, and they have much lower densities than most engineering materials. They are successful not so much because of what they are but because of the way in which they are put together. The geometrical and hierarchical organisation of the fibre architecture is significant. The same collagen fibres are used in low-modulus, highly extensible structures such as blood vessels, intermediate modulus tissues such as tendons and high modulus, rigid materials such as bone.
(Jeronimidis 2004: 92) The illustration shows a first case study of differentiating the material make-up of the classic Panton Chair. A structural analysis of the chair being loaded by a person sitting on it and leaning on the backrest (left) is employed to identify the principal stresses (centre). The fibre layout matches the main stress distribution derived by algorithmically processing the principal stress vectors (right). MArch Dissertation of Christina Doumpioti, February 2008. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315881294/8c633402-ec95-4ecb-990e-cc99cb482b6f/content/fig4_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>