Cooling strategies in the biological systems and termite mound: the potential of emulating them to sustainable architecture and bionic engineering

Abstract

Biomimicry, the science of emulating nature’s strategies, has remarkably contributed to solving many of human problems in different fields. This paper studied the potential of interpreting some of the nature mechanisms to reduce or eliminate energy consumed for cooling purposes. It highlights three of most effective cooling and thermo-regulating strategies in extreme environments which are accomplished through morphological features. For the first two strategies, a comparative analysis of a mutual thermoregulatory mechanism was conducted for four different organisms. The third strategy listed four of the related hypotheses interpreted termite mound’s mechanism of thermoregulation. The study concluded to draw the working principles of each strategy that can contribute to design eco-friendly and passive cooling systems for bionic engineering and architecture. It is assumed that applying thermoregulation strategies will lead to creative designs with significant energy saving.