Design of a Bio-Inspired Optical Current Transducer

The natural world provides numerous cases for analogy and inspiration in engineering design from simple to complex cases. Biological systems often reveal sustainable and adaptable design principles. This research presents a function-based, biomimetic design method that is used to generate and evaluate bio-inspired sensor designs. The natural design of biological systems is examined from an engineering context using functional abstraction and representation. In this paper, the systematic method is applied to a current sensor re-design that is based on magnetically-sensitive chemical reactions found within birds. A novel approach to the standard optical current transducer is described