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This beetle does not give its life easily: thanks to its armor unique in the animal kingdom, it even survives if a car runs through it. Engineers are trying to figure out how to make such an incredibly strong structure.
The vicious armored beetle, one of the beetles, does not lie its sonorous name. Insects that live in the desert regions of Southern California are often flagged for prey by birds, lizards, and small mammals, but they generally come out hungry. It’s no wonder they can’t handle it – the armored beetle continues to walk calmly even after a car has crossed it.
The 10,000 N pressure under the steering wheel of a car doesn’t even hit it, as its armor only starts to crack at 15,000 N.
In the harsh conditions of its habitat, the armored beetle’s survival is ensured by two key abilities: that it can pretend to be dead convincingly enough, and that its outer vase is one of the most massive and break-resistant structures we know of in the animal kingdom. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and other institutes are revealing the secrets of the devil’s insect armor in the latest issue of Nature: exactly what composition of the material and its micro- and nano-level organization make its wearer almost indestructible. The authors also note how engineers can learn from the bravado of the Beetle’s design.
It is a ground-eating beetle so the weight of the feathers is not a consideration, but its movement is agile so I would compare it to a small tank. Said David Kisailus, UCI professor of materials science and engineering, head of research. “This insect has this adaptive trick: It cannot fly, so it prefers to fly and let its specially designed armor bounce off predators’ attempts until they give up.” A beetle native to the deserts of the southwestern states of the US, nesting between the bark and the trunk.
Protective shield with concrete strength
Jesús Rivera, a doctoral student at Kisailus Lab and lead author of the paper, first learned about the existence of these beetles in 2015, during a visit to the renowned entomological collection at the University of California. Rivera began collecting armored beetles from around the university campus and brought them to the lab, where they were subjected to compression tests, comparing them to other native Southern California beetles. The fierce armored beetle has been found to withstand a force equivalent to 39,000 times its body weight.
It’s roughly like packing 3,500 tons of weight for a 90 pound person.
Through a series of high-resolution microscopic and spectroscopic studies, Rivera and Kisailus revealed that the beetle’s secret lies in the material composition and structure of its outer skeleton, especially its wing covers. In flying beetles, the wing covers can be opened during flight; otherwise, they protect the vulnerable pair of wings from infection, dehydration, and other environmental influences. The armored beetle’s wing covers, which had lost its ability to fly, were transformed into a concrete force protective shield.
Kisailus and Rivera’s analyzes showed that the wing covers consist of chitin embedded in a protein reserve. In collaboration with the staff of Atsushi Arakaki and Satoshi Murata of the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, they studied the chemical composition of their research topic, as well as the outer covering of a lighter flying insect species.
The comparison revealed that the outer layer of the diabolical armored beetle’s armor contains significantly, about 10 percent by weight more protein, which scientists believe may contribute to the increased mechanical strength of the wing covers.
The group also examined the geometry of the seam connecting the two wing covers at the midline and found that on the microscale, the seam line most closely resembled the pieces of the puzzle being held together. Rivera has built a separate device that can be used under an electron microscope to study the behavior of connected wing covers under pressure to see what happens when a beetle is attacked in the wild. Instead of the glued pieces of the puzzle breaking down at their thinnest point, their “necks” were separated into layers.
“If we start to shake a piece of the puzzle, it will break mainly at his neck, where he is thinnest,” Kisailus explained. “But we don’t see this catastrophic crack in the outer shell of the armored beetle.” Instead, the layers of material begin to separate, allowing the structure to disintegrate much more elegantly. “
Further investigation also revealed that microscopic chitin hair fields are found on the outer surface of the adhesive plates. Scientists believe that, like a velcro, they have a friction-increasing function and make the associated elements of the seam resistant to slippage.
Kisailus sent Rivera to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to use an extreme-light X-ray source operated by Dula Parkinson and Harold Barnard called the Advanced Light Source to obtain a high-resolution, real-time image of structural changes under load. The results obtained here confirmed that, under pressure, the elements of the seam, instead of breaking at their weakest point, slowly fall on sliding sheets without catastrophic destruction.
Can super strong materials come?
Learning from the example of nature, Rivera, along with co-authors Maryam Hosseini and David Restrepo of Purdue University, created an artificial copy of the structure seen in the insect using 3D printing. Their experiments showed that a faithfully copied structure based on microscopic observations provides the highest possible strength and strength.
Kisailus has high hopes that we can use the secret of the armored beetle’s outer shell for our own purposes. His lab has already created fiber-reinforced composites with a stamped beetle pattern, and he wants to develop an interconnection of aircraft components that causes structurally vulnerable nailing and bolting. “Our study forms a real bridge between biology, physics, mechanics and materials science, and engineering applications, which is rarely the case in basic research,” Kisailus emphasized. “Fortunately, financial support from the United States Air Force has enabled us to establish multidisciplinary task forces, which was essential in putting the pieces of the puzzle together and helping bring a significant discovery to life.”
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