HOW PLANTS REGULATE HEAT - Biomimetic Inspirations for building skins

Biomimicry is an approach that provides inspiration for answers to human problems by observing and analyzing nature’s designs and processes. This paper addresses the problem of thermoregulation of building skins and their effects on cooling loads. These loads are an essential contribution to building energy consumption in hot climates. This research has turned to biology and focused on botanical inspirations for designing building skins. Plants in particular have many similarities with buildings, most importantly, that they are rooted and fixed in their location, and therefore were chosen for this investigation. The aim of this paper is to define a set of biologically-inspired ideas and categorize them according to the main strategy used, the method of heat transfer, and the corresponding architectural feature of the building skin that could be studied. It acts as a small ‘concept database’ and a systematic categorization of ideas for architects interested in biomimetic design.