Olympic-bike-Stuart
Olympic bike, Stuart Burgess

Stuart Burgess: Biology’s Designs Tutor Our Top Engineers

Series
ID the Future
Host
Eric H. Anderson
Guest
Stuart Burgess
Duration
00:14:13
Download
Audio File (9.8 mb)

Today’s ID the Future spotlights a Bristol University engineer whose design work helped Great Britain’s cycling team win gold in the most recent Summer Olympics. Stuart Burgess, currently on a visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge and an expert on linkage mechanisms, discusses with host Eric Anderson how top engineering firms are paying big money to learn from the extraordinary designs found in biology so as to improve their own designs. Burgess has designed groundbreaking linkage mechanisms, but he says the human knee is still well ahead of what even the most advanced human engineers have managed in this area, even accounting for the fact that wear and tear and misuse can lead to knee problems. He walks listeners through some things that make the knee an engineering marvel, and takes a look at some other masterfully designed linkage mechanisms in nature, including those found in the jaws of fish. The occasion for the discussion is Burgess’s recent scholarly paper in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

Stuart Burgess

Professor of Engineering Design at University of Bristol
Dr Stuart Burgess has held academic posts at Bristol University (UK), Cambridge University (UK), and Liberty University (USA). He has published over 180 scientific publications on the science of design in engineering and biology. In the last two Olympics he was the lead transmission designer for the British Olympic Cycling Team, helping them on both occasions to be ranked in first place for track cycling. For the last two decades his gearboxes have been used successfully on all the large earth-observation satellites of the European Space Agency. He has received many national and international awards for design, including the top mechanical engineer award in the UK out of 120,000 professional mechanical engineers.
Tags
bio-engineering
biomimetics
Engineering
fish jaws
force amplification
Stuart Burgess