Bio-Inspired and Intelligent Engineering Structures: Design, Mechanics, and Applications

Bio-Inspired and intelligent engineering structures achieve exceptional combinations of stiffness, strength, toughness, adaptability, and material efficiency through hierarchical organization and multifunctional design. Inspired by these principles, emerging cellular materials, cellular metamaterials, composite structures, and smart materials are enabling engineering structures with programmable responses and improved performance under vibration, impact, and other complex loads. At the same time, advances in computational mechanics, optimization, artificial intelligence, and data-driven modeling are transforming how such structures are conceived, analyzed, manufactured, and validated. Despite this progress, the relationships among architecture, material behavior, manufacturability, durability, and system-level function remain incompletely understood. A coordinated framework that combines mechanics-based insight, intelligent design, and experimental evidence is therefore needed to translate bio-inspired and intelligent concepts into reliable, sustainable, and multifunctional engineering structures and mechanical systems.This Research Topic aims to advance the mechanics-informed and data-enabled development of bio-inspired and intelligent engineering structures. It will address key challenges in linking multi-scale architecture to static, dynamic, impact, multifunctional responses, and structural health monitoring; integrating smart materials with architected and composite systems; and establishing credible pathways from computational design to experimental validation and engineering deployment. Particular emphasis will be placed on recent advances in AI-assisted inverse design, machine learning, surrogate modeling, topology and multidisciplinary optimization, high-fidelity simulation, and intelligent health management. The collection seeks contributions that reveal governing mechanisms, quantify uncertainty and robustness, and demonstrate performance under realistic operating conditions. By bringing together theoretical, computational, experimental, and application-oriented studies, the Topic will help establish transferable design principles and validated tools for lightweight, adaptive, resilient, and sustainable structural systems.We welcome Original Research, Methods, Reviews, Mini Reviews, and Perspectives on: bio-inspired architectures and mechanics; cellular, lattice, chiral, and auxetic metamaterials; smart, composite, and multifunctional structures; sustainable structural concepts and life-cycle-aware design; vibration, wave control, impact, crashworthiness, energy absorption, damage, and failure; computational and multi-scale mechanics; topology, shape, and multidisciplinary optimization; AI-assisted generative or inverse design; physics-informed learning, surrogate modeling, and uncertainty quantification; digital twins, structural health monitoring, and intelligent health management; and experimental characterization and validation. Contributions should maintain a clear focus on mechanical behavior, structural integrity, or engineering performance. Studies that combine mechanics, data-driven methods, and experiments, or that demonstrate applications in aerospace, automotive, energy, civil, biomedical, robotic, or protective systems, are especially encouraged. Topic editors: Yunfei Liu, Babak Safaei, Jun Wang Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86086/bio-inspired-and-intelligent-engineering-structures-design-mechanics-and-applications