About integration opportunities between TRIZ and biomimetics for inventive design

Abstract

This paper presents the first results of a Ph.D. program aimed at investigating the domain interface between TRIZ and Biomimetics within the scope of inventive design. Indeed, a few authors have already proposed as a relevant direction of research the identification of integration opportunities between TRIZ and Biomimetics towards a more effective and efficient inventive design methodology. The paper presents a comparison between the tools based on functional modeling used during the process of problem solving within TRIZ and Biomimetics. This comparison intends to elicit overlaps, complementarities and incongruences of these techniques. The indications about how to improve the process of describing natural solutions in an engineering way and how to describe technical problems in order to use natural information as source of inspiration are given by analyzing few examples. The results are discussed in terms of necessary modifications in the engineering problem description in order to use a database of biological functions (i.e. The Biomimicry Taxonomy) as a source of natural knowledge in the process of inventive design.