Abstract
After years of evolution and natural selection, leaf venation yields to a complicated pattern to achieve better transfer efficiency together with higher structure robustness. In this paper, we use the design of a cooler as an example to explore the benefits of using such venation pattern. We first utilize a bio-inspired venation generation algorithm called space colonization to generate the venation patterns, which is used as the topology of a cooler system. Numerical simulations show that, the venation-inspired design is 10% more efficient than typical cooler in heat conduction, while is about twice more robust under physical damage. These results demonstrate that plants arrange their venation in a very efficient strategy, which can be a very promising source design for both efficiency and robustness considerations.
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Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Kexin Jiao, Yuehui Li, Karanjodh Singh for the discussion and suggestions, and Yuexuan Yang for providing the venation photograph.
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Yao, H., Dai, R., Marvi, H. (2019). A Robust and Efficient Cooler Design Inspired by Leaf Venation. In: Martinez-Hernandez, U., et al. Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11556. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24741-6_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24741-6_25
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