BioInspired! So What? Now What!

The team of Kadhirvel Manickam, Bryan Wang and Shin Hoo Lee won first prize at the 2013 Bay Area Clean Tech Competition for "The Struo", a low-tech idea for extracting water from fog inspired by the Namib beetle.  Rather than the nanotech approach being explored by MIT and NBD Nano, the team proposed weaving a fabric out of a smaller thread that is hydrophilic (similar to cheese cloth material) and a slightly larger thread that is hydrophobic (nylon).  The goal is to provide clean water for third world countries.  The team developed and tested a number of prototypes from which they were able to obtain a wealth of data.

According to Kadhir, their entry was the only biomimetic and passive one - all the rest involved "pumps, solar panels, switches, wires, and very intricate setups".