Boxfish armor inspires researchers

The boxfish gets its name from its boxy shape.

The boxfish’s unique armor draws its strength from hexagon-shaped scales and the connections between them, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found.

“The boxfish is small and yet it survives in the ocean where it is surrounded by bigger, aggressive fish, at a depth of 50 to 100 meters,” said Wen Yang, a UC San Diego alumna now working at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in Switzerland and the paper’s first author. “After I touched it, I realized why it can survive - it is so strong but at the same time so flexible.”

The boxfish’s hard frame and flexible body make it an ideal animal to study for inspiration for armor materials. The hexagon-shaped scales are called scutes. They are connected by sutures, similar to the connections in a baby’s skull, which grow and fuse together as the baby grows.

Most fish have overlapping scales, said Steven Naleway a materials science and engineering Ph.D. student and co-author on the paper. “That means that there are no weak points, should a bite from a predator land exactly in between scales,” he said. “We are currently investigating what mechanical advantage scutes and sutures might provide. We know that the boxfish has survived for 35 million years with this armor, so the design has proved very successful in nature.”

Each hexagonal scale, or scute, has a raised, star-like structure in the center that distributes stress across the entire surface. Under the scutes, the team found an inner layer that forms a complex structure in which collagen fibers interlock. This structure creates a flexible inner layer in the armor, which is difficult to penetrate due to the interlocking collagen fibers. Together, the outer and inner layers of the boxfish armor provide the fish with protection unique in the natural world.

The boxfish's carapace (or shell) is composed of several hexagonal scutes that provide body support and armored protection (center). These scutes are connected by tooth-like joints called sutures, which provide some level of combined strength and flexibility (right). Credit: Michael M. Porter/Clemson University.

The team also tested the scutes’ ability to withstand tension by pulling them apart both horizontally and vertically, as well as their ability to withstand penetration. “We were able to demonstrate that even if a predator manages to generate a crack in the outer layer, the collagen fibers will help to prevent the structure from failing,” said Yang. Her current research focuses on the characterization of bio-inspired materials.  

Meanwhile, the connections between the scutes, called sutures, make the armor even stronger. Upon impact, the sutures’ zigzag patterns essentially lock in and keep the scutes from breaking apart. These sutures are different from many of those found elsewhere in nature, Naleway said.

Read more about the boxfish's sutures and their applications here.

UC San Diego Researchers Launch Startup and Secure VC Investment

Congratulations to MANTA Instruments Inc. for recently securing seed funding investment from the Triton Technology Fund for their breakthrough technology to effectively characterize nanoparticles! Read the press release here.

With decades of fieldwork and experience studying nanoparticles in seawater, MANTA founders Dr. Dariusz Stramski, Dr. Kuba Tatakiewicz and Dr. Rick Reynolds of the Ocean Optics Research Lab at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO) experienced firsthand the difficulty of getting good characterization data from nanoparticle samples. Even with the best technologies and scientific instruments on the market, methods were tedious and inaccurate results were often not usable for their scientific papers. Their experience inspired them to solve this core problem for measuring nanoparticle size and concentration. Stramski, Tatakiewicz and Reynolds developed their initial idea in 2010 and conducted research and development for 36 months at SIO. In 2014, the MANTA team connected with Rosibel Ochoa, Executive Director of the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center, and received mentorship from von Liebig mentor Rick Cooper. Cooper helped the team develop a business plan and financing strategy, and launch MANTA in September 2014.

Though only a little over a year old, the Triton Technology Fund has already funded four exciting new startup companies based on UC San Diego affiliated technology. Since its launch in April 2014, the Triton Technology Fund has drawn interest from UC San Diego undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and alumni, receiving over 64 diverse applications from 17 different UC San Diego departments – including the Rady School of Management, Economics, the School of Medicine and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography alongside several departments within the Jacobs School of Engineering.

The Triton Technology Fund was created to support UC San Diego students, faculty and affiliates by helping them accelerate the commercialization of their discoveries and technologies. The Fund’s goal is to leverage UC San Diego breakthroughs that will ultimately benefit society and is actively looking to fund software, communications, electronics, materials and medical devices and support those that have innovative business-to-business solutions. If you’ve got a concept that you’ve been working on, swing by the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center. They’ll point you in the right direction.

Jacobs School engineers helping to find downed WWII aircraft in the Pacific

Aerospace engineering professor Mark Anderson and his students are working hand in hand with oceanographer Eric Terrill at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to find a missing B-24 in the Pacific. The project is part of a partnership with the Office of Naval Research to find downed WWII aircraft and the remains of troops listed as missing in action for nearly 70 years.

According to a Scripps press release:

Other UC San Diego researchers joined the search in different ways. Terrill collaborates with Mark Anderson of UC San Diego’s Department of Aeronautical Engineering. Anderson has a background in aeronautics, flight trajectories, and statistics and was asked by Terrill to help with developing a predictive model for a missing B-24 that remains to be found. A group of engineering students was enlisted to run what are known as Bayesian models, using the best-known historic information collected by BentProp over the last decade.  During the most recent expedition, the probability maps for areas where the plane might be located were routinely updated by the students (during their Spring break) based upon data collected by Terrill’s group that was relayed to them in San Diego.  The plane remains missing, and teams remain focused on planning for a 2015 mission to complete their search. 

Terrill's efforts were featured recently on CBS news magazine "60 Minutes" and in a documentary by camera manufacturer GoPro.