Mother Nature – The Perfect Engineer

One of my first bosses, Edward V. LaBudde, made it a priority in his own career to study the designs that he observed to have been created by Mother Nature.  In his mind, Mother Nature had been creating and optimizing her designs for millions of years. To him, these designs were examples of what can happen when you continue to improve design to take advantage of new knowledge and past failures.  After continued improvement for millions of years, he felt that these designs, in nature, had almost reached perfection. Therefore, he taught our group of naïve and inexperienced engineers to copy Mother Nature in our own designs, and NEVER create a design that in any way violated Mother Nature’s design rules.  To him, Mother Nature was the perfect engineer and he wanted us to follow her example.

Fig 1 - Shell spiral

Let me give one example.  One day, I attended the design review of a box of electronics.  It was basically a tall 19-inch rack, full of electronic equipment, which was totally enclosed by sheet metal.  The electronic elements inside the metal box were dissipating a lot of energy and heat. The engineer in charge of the project had determined that it was necessary to add a fan to move the hot air out of the box, in order to prevent overheating of the electronics.

My boss was leading the discussion at the time and asked the engineer about a fan.

“Where is the fan?” my boss asked. “I don’t see it on the drawing.”

“It is here,” responded the young engineer, pointing to a small muffin fan located in the center of the sheet-metal panel at the bottom of the box.   

Fig 2 - Electronics Rack

My boss was silent as he considered the engineer’s response, but decided to find out more about the fan.

“Why did you decide to mount the fan in that location?” continued my boss.

“There was plenty of room, there,” replied the engineer, “and I did not want to restrict the airflow as it was drawn towards the fan.”

I noticed a slight tremor in my boss’s face as he heard what the engineer said. Yet he maintained his composure and continued asking more about the fan.

“Exactly which way is the fan moving the air?” he asked.

“I am blowing it out the bottom of the electronic box,” the engineer responded. 

At this point, my boss was noticeably upset, and he gripped his executive ballpoint pen tightly.

“Why did you decide to blow the air out of the bottom of the box?” he asked the engineer, while still maintaining complete control of his emotions.

“It seemed like a good choice,” he responded.  “I guess I could have blown it the other way.  What’s the difference?”

At this point, I am afraid my boss realized that he would need to watch this engineer carefully with the possibility that he may need to fire him, sometime in the future.

“Which way will the hot air move, if you don’t have a fan?” my boss asked, wondering how this young engineer had ever made it through college.

The young engineer turned from my boss and carefully studied the drawing on the projection screen at the front of the room.  Everyone in the room sat silently as the engineer thought about the question. It’s possible that he thought back to his heat transfer class in college where the professor had talked about Natural Convection.  Or maybe he remembered the time he burned his throat breathing in the steam coming from a pot of boiling soup on his mother’s stove. Or possibly he remembered the day he was hiking along the side of a road in the hot desert and saw the blurred vision of a car in the distance.  It is even possible that he remembered how the leaves in the trees rustled high above a campfire at a campout he attended as a young Boy Scout. For whatever reason, he finally turned to my boss and replied, “I think it will go upwards.”

“Exactly!” exclaimed my boss, rising from his chair, “Then why in the world would you want to try to force it to move in the opposite direction?”

The young engineer turned around and looked again at the drawing on the screen.  In my mind, I think I heard an audible “click” as the engineer finally understood why my boss seemed upset.  He should have realized that he was violating the laws of Mother Nature when he tried to force hot air to descend instead of rising like it would do all by itself.  Instead of blowing hot air downward, he should have taken advantage of the laws of nature and helped the air move in the direction it already wanted to move, namely out of the holes at the top of the box.

Fig 3 - Maple Leaf

Ever since then, I have always done as my boss did, and make a note whenever I see examples of designs created by “Mother Nature”.  It might be a tall tree with a round trunk, that is larger in diameter next to the ground where the bending moment is highest. It might be a flock of geese flying in formation to take advantage of wingtip vortices from the birds in front.  Or it might be the incredible shape of Maple Tree seeds that seem to float in the air as they twirl down like small helicopters. Perhaps the most incredible design is that of the human body with all of its complexities.  

Each time I witness a design generated by what my boss referred to as “Mother Nature”, I stand in awe at the wisdom and the effort that went into its creation.  And I appreciate, more and more, the wonderful opportunity that engineers have to participate in the amazing and creative process of design.