Fish scales are usually discarded by market vendors, proving no direct purpose for humans. But it appears that they actually have some value in them that is worth looking into: this kind of material serves as an inspiration for protective gloves.
“The people at the fish market must have wondered what we were up to,” says François Barthelat, a professor of mechanical engineering at McGill, who is among the many scientists searching for solutions from nature-inspired phenomena.
For five years, he and his team have tried to replicate the kind of protection combined with flexibility offered by certain kinds of animal scale. Now they might have developed protective glasses that are resistant to piercing, but flexible enough for use.
The material that they have explored for this discovery? Scales of an alligator gar.
Source: Giphy
Researchers have discovered the property after a series of experiments identifying a set of critical mechanisms in the way natural fish scales deform, interact, and fracture. Through this, they were also able to perform a new technique to cover large surfaces with a shell of overlapping ceramic tiles.
Striped bass after another, until they counted about 50 in a span of two years, they have tried to understand the properties and mechanics of fish scales under the microscope.
All they had to do was puncture and hundreds of fish scales to make the discovery, and further use computer modelling to develop protective glass with optimal size, shape, arrangement, and overlap. They say that the gloves they devised are much more resistant to piercing than those currently in use.
Even Roberto Martini, lead author of the paper and a post-doctoral student, tells that he is shocked about the findings.
“Fish scales surprised us,” he says. “It may sound counter intuitive, but we discovered that smaller scales are actually more difficult to pierce than the larger ones, something we can now fully explain using engineering analysis. We also learned that they are the toughest collagen-based material known.”
Barthelat went on to say that nature has been finding solutions to ‘engineering problems’ over millions of years of evolution.
“For a long time biologists and engineers largely ignored each other, but this is now changing,” he observes. “Biologists are using more and more engineering tools and methods, and engineers are revisiting old engineering problems using bioinspiration. Biologists and engineers are now talking to each other more than ever before, which is very stimulating and makes it is a very exciting time to be working in this field.”
Indeed, many engineering products now are inspired by nature and this gloves might just be one of them in the future. It will be useful in the manufacturing, among other industries.
Source: Phys.org
