- Using the shape of animals
to create pleasing, aesthetic looking cars is nothing new.
Some of the most beautiful cars ever designed
are shaped off of some of our friends in the wild,
the Mini Cooper and its bulldog squat,
the Volkswagen beetle,
and my favorite car of all times the Dodge Viper.
The looks, they are so superficial.
(bells chiming)
So I wanted to know,
how do designers and engineers mimic animals
to build better functioning cars?
So today I'm gonna speak to the communications director
of the Biomimicry Institute,
and talk to Sisi Liu of Metalmark Innovations.
I'm gonna talk to a company that's using mantis shrimp
to build stronger and lighter carbon fiber chassies.
And as a bonus, why not chat
with one of my favorite car designers,
Mr. Frank Stephenson?
The man behind the design of Escort RS Cosworth,
the Ferrari F430, Maserati NC12,
the Mini Cooper, the McLaren P1.
(upbeat music)
- A big thank you to Eibach for sponsoring today's video.
As you travel great distances
into the boundless abyss of the unknown,
warm pavement transitions into cool gravel.
Gravel transitions into rocks, rocks into boulders.
Can you handle it?
Will your suspension take you higher
or will it give up in this very moment,
sending you into a U-turn of a life
with your truck's complacent suspension?
Do you hear those whispers?
The whispers of automotive prowess?
(man speaks dramatically)
Built on a racing legacy from Lamar to Daytona
and now to Baja.
Roll over complacency with your iBox suspension
and become enlightened.
What do you think Job?
- Honestly, James I have no idea what you're talking about,
but I do know your suspension is the first thing
that you should do.
And one of the biggest and best out there is Eibach.
The legacy they've built within the industry
is now expanding to off-road suspension.
They have a new line of nitrogen charged,
pro truck coilovers that are gonna be perfect for me
and Jerry's GXs.
They developed this exact suspension with a ton of feedback
from the GX community,
and their plug and play system works with stock components.
So that's gonna make your life a hell of a lot easier
on install, but it's even better on the road.
I for one, I've always been a big fan of Eibach
and it's really cool that we're getting
to work with them now,
and I'm so excited to put this stuff on my GX.
- In order to learn more about iBox product range
and their new off-road suspension,
click the link in the description below,
or just go to eibach.com.
See you on the trail, Job.
(man humming)
- Designing a car's aesthetic based on the shape of animals
is a pretty common thing.
But like we said at the start of this,
looks aren't all that matters.
So what if we were to take the lessons learned
from billions of years of evolution
and mimic it to engineer other aspects of a car,
outside of its looks?
Well, that's where Biomimicry comes in.
- Biomimicry can be used in so many different industries.
I mean, let's talk about a morpho butterfly
that actually doesn't have pigments or dyes,
it uses structural color.
There's an easy example in a photovoltaic panel.
You know, we're looking at how to translate the way
that a plant takes energy from the sun that we can use.
- This is Lex Amore, and she is the communication's director
of the Biomimicry Institute.
Biomimicry it's the science
of how nature approaches the design of organisms.
So by studying how nature works,
we can take what we learn and apply to applications
that benefit us two legged animals.
And to be honest is kind of an obvious thing to do.
Animals have had years of evolution
to work out all the kinks.
- This concept of finding inspiration in the strategies
that have developed over Earth's 3.85 billion years
of research and development.
So the species that are alive today,
hold the blueprints to our design challenges.
- So if we know that studying nature
can give us some insight into building better things,
how does that translate into the auto industry?
Well, I got to sit down with the CEO
of Heela chord industries, a company responsible
for bringing us some super strong carbon fiber,
thanks to the mantis shrimp.
Now the club on the mantis shrimp,
produces the fastest punch in the animal kingdom.
It's moving about 50 miles an hour,
50 times faster than your human eye can blink.
And it produces forces right at 8,000 G,
fast enough to rip water apart, causing it to capitate.
So it's pretty easy to see that
if the structure of this shrimp's club
weren't designed to withstand these forces,
it wouldn't survive.
And by taking a look at the shrimp's club on a smaller scale
you can see here, this chord structure,
the building blocks of the material in the shrimp's club
rotate as it builds up.
This unique Helicoid architecture is stronger
and tougher than any other known bio structure in the world.
- Yeah, so the mantis shrimp is one
of the most dynamic organisms on the entire planet
'cause these clubs go through that huge
what should be a catastrophic impact,
and yet they do it tens of thousands of times
without damage.
- So by mimicking the structure and not the material
you can take carbon fiber for example,
a material we use all the time
and now layer it in a fashion similar to how the clubs are
on the mantis shrimp.
- So all they would have to do
is when they're hand laying it up
use uni directional material,
lay it up in this helicoid architecture,
and then go through the exact same manufacturing process.
- So by rotating the uni directional sheets of carbon fiber
at various degrees,
you can achieve certain functional properties.
And the benefits, they're pretty amazing.
The current best architecture
that's used in the aerospace industry today,
has carbon fiber layered at zero degrees,
and a 45 left at 45 right or then 90 degrees.
So if we were to compare it to the same material,
the same resident, the same manufacturing process
but just putting it in the Helicoid configuration,
it can delay catastrophic failure by 74%.
It can improve the overall impact strength by more than 50%.
It can increase the load bearing about 92%.
So you don't need to know what each one of those means
to realize that this stuff is the real deal.
So real, that Helicoid has partnered
with Carvajal General Motors
to build an all carbon monocar, in (indistinct)
- It's called Carvajal General Motors,
they're based here in Riverside.
They found us and our technology.
And then we decided to partner on this chassis
to make it stronger and lighter, more impact resistant,
and also be able to produce at a cheaper cost
because we're using less of the rock
the really expensive carbon fiber.
- So here's the prototype that's planned
to be built by the end of the year.
It's gonna weigh 2,500 pounds, have a 500 mile range,
400 horsepower and cost right under 60k.
And it's modular, so you can change it up however you want.
You want it to be sportier, put a spoiler top on it, great.
You want it for two people, five people, three people
whatever you want, they can kind of do it.
And they don't have a name for it yet,
so I think we should help them out.
My vote goes for the Shrimp Pit.
(people booing)
So we can learn from the mantis shrimp
to help us build stronger carbon fiber.
So how can a butterfly help us clean up our air?
The folks over at Metalmark Innovations
are using butterflies to not only reduce the amount
of bad pollutants coming out of your car's tailpipe,
but also improve the air quality
inside the cabin of the car.
I sat down and I picked the brain
of the CEO of Metalmark innovations, Sisi Liu,
to see how these butterflies to help clean up exhaust fumes.
- Our technology is inspired by butterflies
like the Metalmark.
And then in this case the original starting point
was structural colors,
was colors as a result of the structure of the material.
- We actually talked about this in our paint episode of B2B.
On the wings of these butterflies,
are some pretty amazing looking iridescent colors
that are achieved not by pigments,
but by the micro structure in the material
that make up their wings.
The physical structure of the butterfly wing interacts
with visible light to create color.
Lexus used this technology to paint their car
that special type of blue,
even though there's no blue in the pigment.
If you've ever touched a moth or butterfly
and notice the dust that comes off its wings,
well, if we were to take that dust
and look at it under a high powered microscope,
it's structure is what engineers
and scientists are mimicking.
- My co-founders were able to then take
that a step further because you know,
there was discovery in that process.
- Researchers discovered that when they mimic that structure
and coat it with metal nanoparticles, it acts as a catalyst.
It converts toxic and odor causing particles
into harmless ones.
So inside the stainless steel housing
of your car's catalytic converter,
there are two ceramic blocks.
Each block has thousands and thousands of channels
for the exhaust gases to through.
And the inside of these channels are coated with platinum
and rhodium and the first block,
and platinum and palladium in the second block.
And these metals, they act as catalysts.
They speed up the rate of a chemical reaction
without being consumed.
So all these harmful gases that are leaving the engine,
pass through the metal coated pores in the ceramic
and cause those gas molecules to break apart
and then reform into less toxic gases.
But there are some problems with the current system.
One being that ceramic block it's gotta get hot
for the reactions to take place.
These catalysts they aren't very efficient
at low temperatures.
So when you go to start your car,
until that block reaches around 250 degrees C,
they aren't performing to their utmost potential.
Meaning under 250 degrees,
all those bad exhaust fumes
are getting dumped into the atmosphere.
Now on the other end of the temperature spectrum
they lose their activity at high temperatures.
So to combat this,
a manufacturer will just spray on more platinum palladium
and rhodium to compensate for their inefficiencies.
And now you have a super expensive car
with more or less a bandaid fix.
But this is where nature comes in to help us out.
Researchers were able to take what they learned
from butterflies to develop a new approach
for the design and formation of a catalytic material.
They basically can synthesize their own butterfly desks.
- And so you, in that application
we coat the walls of the colors in Brunner.
It's very much like what they already do.
It's just that with our material,
it carries this structure
that provides much higher functions.
- So they take this synthesized powder,
containing the metal catalyst
and they spray it on the channels
of the catalytic converter.
And this material not only allows
for a more efficient loading of those very pricey,
catalytic metals, but also the catalyst perform better
at lower and higher temperatures,
all while needing less of it to do so.
And if we think of that on a big scale
that's extremely impressive.
The more cars that use this technology,
the less pollution they're gonna emit.
There's even less pollution dumped out
by the machines used to mine these metals
because you need less of it.
So next time you see a butterfly, give it a little kiss.
- Oh, Hey Jerry.
- Oh, thanks butterfly.
- Oh, thanks, you have such nice lips.
Bye bye
One of the most prolific designers in the car world,
Mr. Frank Stephenson has used biomimicry as a foundation
for his design philosophy.
His designed for the McLaren P1
pulled inspiration from the world's fastest fish,
the sail fish to help in two distinct aspects of the car.
One to improve engine performance,
and the other to mitigate wind noise,
- I bought a sailffish in Miami.
We sent it down to the arrow lab
in the embracing department.
They scanned it for us.
It was amazing how much influence the scales
are the way they are in a sailfish.
And nothing really happens when it's going slow.
It starts to work at higher speeds.
The little bubbles of air started to blend together
and to create eventually a film of air,
and then there's a separation.
There's a boundary layer, as we call it,
basically you get this fish with no water touching it.
And the fish is basically just in a pocket of air.
And then you get this NASCAR principle of drafting
where the front car pulls the back car,
and that car pushes the front car
at an efficient actually accelerated even faster
than it should be.
- So they took the same design
of the scales of the sail fish,
they shrunk them down and they molded them
into the inside of the ducks
that led into the engine of their P1 hypercar.
And by doing this, they were able to increase the volume
of air going into the engine by 17%.
Now, when they were testing the P1,
they were getting a lot of wind noise
along the eight pillars.
The faster they went, the louder it was.
The reason was because the mirror arm holding the mirror
needed a fairly large arm coming off the body of the car.
So problem started when the wind flow came around
the wind screen then went under and over that arm.
So to the sailfish they went, to help solve this problem.
Now on the sailfish where the torso meets the tail fan,
there are two bumps on the fish.
And they have this elongated teardrop shape.
And that shape amazingly adheres to the proportions
of 1.618, the golden rule of proportion.
- There's something called the Fibonacci spiral.
So this is a Fibonacci spiral,
basically it just tightens up
but it's on the ratio of 1.618,
not 1.619, not 1.617, 1.618.
And basically that is the correct proportion in nature
for a lot of things.
I mean, it's any element that I designed,
I consistently tried to use that ratio.
- So those two little bumps,
those golden ratio rule following fish bumps,
do something quite cool.
When the sail fish is swimming in that pocket of air,
thanks to its scales, getting up to 70 miles an hour,
that air pocket it has to close off at some point
and the water has to rejoin it as smoothly as possible
without creating any excessive drag.
And those two bumps, they allow that water and air
to rejoin in a very efficient way.
So Frank put five of those doublet bumps on the mirror arm
and the wind noise completely disappeared.
They actually use those bumps, not just on the P1,
but also on the 12C and a lot of other McLaren's.
I think one of the main lessons we can learn
is that if you're in Miami
and you see a taxidermied fish for sale,
put it on the company card.
I wanna thank all the people that took their time
to impart some knowledge on me for this episode.
If you wanna learn more about any of their work,
I've put them in the link in the description.
So please go check out their websites,
go check out their YouTube pages.
They have some amazing stuff
that we didn't even really get to talk about fully.
So go check them out.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode of B2B,
till next week.
(upbeat music)