BOHEME’s ambitious goal is to design and realise a new class of bioinspired mechanical metamaterials for novel applicative tools in diverse technological fields. Metamaterials exhibit exotic vibrational properties currently unavailable in Nature, and numerous important applications are emerging. However, universally valid design criteria are currently lacking, and their effectiveness is presently restricted to limited frequency ranges. BOHEME starts from an innovative assumption, increasingly supported by experimental evidence, that the working principle behind metamaterials is already exploited in Nature, and that through evolution, this has given rise to optimised designs for impact damping and other wave manipulation purposes.
From the perspective of basic science, the project aims to explore biological structural materials for evidence of this, to investigate novel optimised bio inspired designs (e.g. porous hierarchical structures spanning various length scales,cochlea-inspired spirals that select sound frequencies, spider web-inspired frames that attenuate vibrations) using state-of-the-art analytical and numerical approaches, to design and manufacture vibrationally effective structures, and to experimentally verify their performance over wide frequency ranges.
From the point of view of applications, BOHEME has addressed technological sectors over various wavelength scales, from low-frequency vibration control (such as vibrations generated by trains), to noise abatement (e.g. in MRI scanners), to nondestructive testing using “acoustic lenses”, to resonating floater arrays to protect against coastal erosion from ocean waves. Industrial partners have been involved in proof of principle experiments and development of prototypes, which will hopefully be further developed and brought to the commercialization stage.
