Another lesson from mother nature

Telecommunications Americas, Oct, 2003 by Sue O'Keefe

Next time you go deep-sea fishing, keep an eye out for a deep-sea sponge called Euplectella, otherwise known as the Venus Flower Basket. If you find one, you might well be taking a look at one of the next important advancements in fiber optics.

OK, so it sounds a little far-fetched that Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs is studying biomimetics, which takes engineering principles from the natural world and applies them to man-made materials and technologies. But the discovery is interesting because the sponge's glass fiber could shed new light on ways to make optical fiber more resilient and less costly.

The Venus Flower Basket has an intricate cylindrical mesh-like skeleton of glassy silica whose base is a tuft of fibers (ranging from 2 to 7 inches, with the thickness of a human hair) that extends outward like an inverted crown. While the fibers don't have the high transparency needed for use in telecom networks, Bell Labs researchers found the fibers were extremely resilient to cracks and breaks because of an organic sheath that covers the biological fiber. "You could tie them in tight knots and, unlike commercial fiber, they still would not crack," says Joanna Aizenberg, the Bell Labs material scientist who led the research team.

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Another advantage, the team found, is that the biological fibers are formed by chemical deposition at the temperature of seawater, unlike commercial optical fiber, which is produced with the help of a high-temperature furnace and expensive equipment. "If we can learn from nature, there may be an alternative way to manufacture fiber in the future," Aizenberg says.