Hey Surfers, Soon Your Wetsuit May Be Covered in Fur

About a year ago,

I was fortunate to go and visit

a wetsuit manufacturing company.

I learned that there are a lot of challenges

in manufacturing wetsuits.

So we started to discuss whether there are ways

we could use bio-inspired solutions

to develop a new way of fabricating wetsuits.

Marine mammals typically use two strategies for warmth.

One is blubber.

Something like walruses or sea lions

have a thick layer of blubber

that keeps them warm when they dive

and the other strategy is fur.

So otters and fur seals use fur

and this layer of fur,

the insulation doesn't actually come from the fur,

it comes from the layer of air

that's trapped within the fur.

The current philosophy for manufacturing wetsuits

basically imitates blubber.

It's a thick layer of rubber

that encases the surfer.

Can we look at the other paradigm which is fur

and use something that is lighter

and will make the surfer more nimble?

When I started doing this,

my first thought was, Nobody's gonna buy a wetsuit

that makes them look like cookie monster.

One of the things we wanted to check

was to understand how long do you really need these hairs

in order for this to work?

And it turns out they don't need to be that long.

Looking at a very simplified model,

we're just looking at hairs of uniform length and spacing.

So we're inspired by aquatic mammals.

They've got this two layer fur system

such that there's very dense under fur

and longer guard hairs that stick together

to keep that air trapped.

As Alice showed you,

it's sort of more of a texturing

that's kind of millimetric in scale.

So I would envision something like that ultimately

in the final product.

The next step is to understand

how to scale up the manufacturing.

For example, to go back to Sheico and say,

We now have these design principles.

We know what our optimal densities and hair lengths

to make something like this.

Let's understand how you manufacture these things at scale

and determine whether there are small changes

you could make to the current manufacturing process

that would enable this new material.

When you look at natural systems,

a lot of them have evolved very efficient ways

to perform certain tasks.

So if we, as engineers, want to do something similar,

it can often be useful to look at those natural solutions.

We want to understand the physical mechanisms

behind the biological solution

and then adapt those mechanisms into engineering design.

(upbeat music)