DEVELOPMENT OF A KEYWORD SEARCH ALGORITHM FOR BIOINSPIRED DESIGN OF FOLDABLE ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS

摘要

The ion of biological folding mechanisms can lead to the development of novel foldable solutions for engineering problems. Examples of biological structures that are analogous to foldable engineering solutions are discussed and serve as inspiration for this research effort. Numerous folding mechanisms exist in nature and have not been considered for engineering solutions simply because they are not well-known or studied by designers. These folding mechanisms may provide useful design inspiration for novel engineering applications. To retrieve meaningful biological design analogies; information retrieval techniques are employed and a text-based search algorithm is developed to return useful passages where folding mechanisms in nature are observed. The search algorithm integrates tailored keywords and filtering methods to retrieve passages from an extensive biological corpus. Keywords are established using literature review and WordNet. The search algorithm is validated using an inter-rater reliability analysis and statistical methods for information retrieval. Passages describing biological systems are evaluated and potential engineering applications are discussed to demonstrate the functionality of the search algorithm. Methods for improvement and areas for future work are discussed.