抄録
Today's industrial products are sometime designed by inspiration from nature. The observations of the nature bring us fruitful ideas such as like echolocation in bats, fabric which emulates shark sin, and so on. For mechanical product development, structural optimization is very important because it determines product cost, weight, and fuel consumption. Hence, a concept generation method of topological structure is highly desired. This research hypothesis that bionmimicry may also contribute to generate the design concepts of topological structure. TRIZ is one of the famous design support method in concept design stage. TRIZ provides the design support in the problem definition and solving process. This paper proposes a biomimicric design support method based on TRIZ. The concept generation of topological structure has not been scientifically studied in the literature. In this work, the design principles and design processes of the topological structure are proposed based on a throughout observation of the nature animals, insects, and plants. We use an inductive approach to gather and study the weight saving techniques. The natural analogies considering weight saving is found and categorized. Based on the categorized analogies, this paper proposes a design process to apply the biomimicric weight saving idea. Based on the nature observation, the authors categorized five weight saving principles and facilitators. The principles and facilitators are proposed based on gathering and searching the analogies. The proposed design method provides the more concepts of the topological structures in the early design stage.
