Butterfly wings inspire earthquake-resistant building designs

When you hear about designers biomiming butterflies, the first thing that comes to mind is probably creating remote-controlled flying toys or small artificial flying machines that could be useful for pollination, especially in areas experiencing bee colony collapse. But butterfly imitation goes beyond those uses to include scattering light to replace toxic paints or as an anti-fraud mechanism against counterfeiters, the development of optical computing, and even the creation of superior eye implants.

It now also includes building construction.

Because when you think about designing massive, heavy structures that require the strength to withstand hundreds of tons of pressure from people, furniture, equipment and their respective components – not to mention wind pressures and the potential for earthquakes – why not immediately think about applying the small, delicate and organic stained glass window structure we call butterfly wings?

In their paper in the International Journal of Mechanical Sciences, Jing Wei, Xiao Wong, and their colleagues at Wuhan University of Technology in China, and Eric Jianfeng Cheng of Tohoku University in Japan, explain how, despite the low design value of mass and high energy absorption of conventional grids, their weakness lies in stress concentration.

One hit in the wrong place and boom! – Total collapse and disasters. To counter this brittleness, the researchers applied the uniform stress distribution of butterfly wings to the architecture, using a butterfly-inspired body-centered cubic (BCCB) topology (shapes that can withstand twisting or stretching).

The greatest strength of this design, which increases its ability to absorb energy and resist shocks, is its anisotropic mesh. In anisotropy, which is the opposite of isotropy, the structure is not uniform in all directions. Think of a tree – hit a cut section of it with an ax along its wood grain, and it will break easily. Hit that tree with the same ax on the grain, and it will take a long time for it to fall. Polarized lenses, crystals, steel polymers, and 3D printed objects are all anisotropic, while a rubber ball or the contents of a glass of water are isotropic.

By applying anisotropy to architecture, designers achieve controllable deformation and non-destructive stress redistribution during compression. As Chen explains, “This structural mechanism is particularly remarkable, since most lightweight mesh materials are unable to withstand forces such as local buckling or impact. In contrast, our design shows much greater resistance to sudden mechanical loading.”

The diagram shows how the structure of butterfly wings can be incorporated into load-bearing structures

Eric Jianfeng Cheng et al.

If researchers continue to achieve useful results with anisotropic designs, their goal is to use their strength and light weight to design cars, airplanes and even spacecraft, and of course to create earthquake-resistant infrastructure. The imperative for such innovation in this area is enormous.

For example, the 1995 earthquake/tsunami that struck the city of Kobe, despite lasting only 20 seconds, destroyed 100,000 buildings, and the 2011 earthquake/tsunami that struck Tohoku, Japan, killed more than 15,000 people and forced 130,000 people from their homes temporarily or permanently. The 2004 earthquake that struck the Sumatra-Andaman Islands triggered a tsunami, killing 280,000 people and displacing 1.1 million people in countries of East Africa and South Asia.

Therefore, buildings using Wuhan and Tohoku anisotropic design offer great hope for preventing widespread injury and death during earthquakes, or making faster repairs and reducing the number of abandoned homes. In both mechanical simulations and tests involving dynamic impact loading and quasi-static compression, the anisotropic designs significantly outperformed conventional mesh designs, redistributing stress across deformation resembling stretched butterfly wings, thus preventing complete collapse.

Source: Tohoku University

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