A Biomimetic Approach to the Creation of Polymer Materials with Improved Tribological Properties

The work is devoted to the use of methods of applied mathematics and statistics for the formalization and mathematical modeling of the structure of shark skin as a prototype of new polymer materials for shipbuilding purposes. A technique for mathematical modeling of biological objects is described, and a method for using a biomimetic approach for the design of planar composite polymer materials with improved lyophilic adhesion properties is proposed. Because of studying images of shark skin obtained using high-resolution optical (HRO) and scanning electron (SEM) microscopy, we found that its texture is anisotropic. Quantitative analysis of BOM and SEM images made it possible to rationalize the choice of synthetic digital models intended for simulation prototyping of maximally and minimally texturally isotropic polymer samples using 3D printing and gas-phase surface modification.