Bio‐inspired Materials Chemistry

Progress reports are a new type of article in Advanced Materials, dealing with the hottest current topics, and providing readers with a critically selected overview of important progress in these fields. It is not intended that the articles be comprehensive, but rather insightful, selective, critical, opinionated, and even visionary. We have approached scientists we believe are at the very forefront of these fields to contribute the articles, which will appear on an annual basis. The article below describes the latest advances in bio‐inspired materials chemistry.     

Bio‐inspired Materials Chemistry

Progress reports are a new type of article in Advanced Engineering Materials, dealing with the hottest current topics, and providing readers with a critically selected overview of important progress in these fields. It is not intended that the articles be comprehensive, but rather insightful, selective, critical, opinionated, and even visionary. We have approached scientists we believe are at the very forefront of these fields to contribute the articles, which will appear on an annual basis. The article below describes the latest advances in Bio‐inspired Materials Chemistry.     

Bio‐Interface of Conducting Polymer‐Based Materials for Neuroregeneration

Nerve system diseases like Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's disease, etc. seriously affect thousands of patients' lives every year, making them suffer from pains and inconvenience. Recently, bio‐interfaces between neural cells/tissues and polymer based biomaterials attracted worldwide attention due to the ability of polymer based biomaterials to serve as nerve conduits, drug carriers and neurites guidance platform in neuroregeneration. The role that bio‐interface played and the way it interacted with neural tissues and cells have been thoroughly investigated by the researchers. In this paper we mainly focus on reviewing the bio‐interface between nerve tissues/cells and advanced functional biocompatible polymers, such as conducting polymers and advanced carbon composite materials. These advanced polymers can provide combined interfacial stimulations including interfacial external neurotrophic factors (NTFs) delivery, electrical stimulation, surface guidance and molecules decoration to lesion cells and tissues to promote neuroregeneration in vitro and in vivo, and have contributed greatly to nerve diseases therapy. At the end of this review, the criteria of polymer based biomaterials utilized in neuroregeneration are summarized and the perspectives for future development of bio‐interfaces are also discussed.     

Bio‐inspired algorithms for the optimization of offshore oil production systems

This work describes the development, implementation, and assessment of enhanced variants of three different groups of bio‐inspired methodologies: genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, and artificial immune system. The algorithms are implemented on a computational tool for the synthesis and optimization of offshore oil production risers that connect a floating platform at the sea surface to the wellheads at the sea bottom. Optimization procedures using bio‐inspired algorithms for such real‐world engineering problems require the calculation of the objective function through a large number of time‐consuming finite element nonlinear dynamic analyses, for the evaluation of the structural behavior of each candidate configuration. Therefore, the performance of the algorithms may be measured by the smaller number of objective function evaluations associated to a given target fitness value. The results indicate that the artificial immune system approach, incorporating some enhancements presented in this work, is more effective than the genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization methods, requiring a smaller number of evaluations to obtain better solutions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.