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Richard Maltzman
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A citrus fruit schools us on material science and project leadership (Part 1 of 2)
Black Tape Over the Engine Light
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Date
A recent video ‘short’ from Boston University, which features dropping a citrus fruit – a pomelo – from the roof of a university building – caught my attention. This video focuses on the possible connection between the pomelo and better phone cases, but keep in mind that the implications are much bigger (literally and figuratively) than phone cases.Click on the picture or the link for the short video.
Click
here for video.
Since it caught my interests as a good example of applying biomimicry in design, I followed some of the research, and I am glad I did – on top of the biomimicry here, it has some good lessons on project leadership.The way I am approaching this blog post is to break it into to two parts. The first focuses on the science. Since this is about biomimicry, and since I fell into the rabbit-hole while trying to understand this myself, I thought I would share the ‘bio’ part first, and then go into the ‘mimicry’ and leadership piece with that well in hand.I know…this is going to seem a bit science-geeky, but I promise that this will connect to the intersection of project leadership and sustainability, and if you don’t want the science piece, you can wait for part 2 which should be available in a week or two.So let’s cut to the chase – literally, by looking at a cross-section of a pomelo:
The albedo – the piece involved in the biomimicry - is effectively a natural, porous foam. Its parenchyma cells have intercellular air spaces that help dissipate energy when a fruit falls, protecting the internal pulp and seeds. The parenchyma refers to the soft, living plant tissues that make up this layerResearchers at Boston University and Texas A&M University and beyond have studied this for several years.Their work focused on the pomelo peel's unique gradient porosity—small pores near the outside, larger pores in the middle, and finer pores again near the fruit. They developed finite-element models and Voronoi-based foam structures that replicated this architecture. Their simulations showed improved energy dissipation and impact resistance compared with conventional uniform foams. Wait a second, you say. What’s this about Voronoi-based foam structures? What’s that about? I couldn’t help myself, I had to follow that rabbit-hole as well.Voronoi structures are patterns that naturally divide space into many adjoining regions, each centered around a particular point. They were first described mathematically by the Russian mathematician Georgy Voronoi, but similar structures are found throughout nature.It’s not an actual Voronoi structure but a giraffe’s coat pattern gives you the basic idea. Whether in biological tissues, mineral formations, animal markings, or cellular materials, Voronoi-like patterns often emerge when space is filled efficiently and neighboring regions grow until they meet.The function of a Voronoi structure is to organize space into distinct territories with minimal gaps and overlaps. In biological systems, these structures can help explain how cells pack together, occupy available space efficiently, or distribute forces. That last part – about distributing forces – is key here.Shock absorption is precisely about that!To bring this back to the pomelo, I used a simple example of five PMI Exam test centers first, and then expanded that to 2,000 sites so you can see the similarity to the pomelo’s albedo.
Now let's expand that by a couple of orders of magnitude...
OK, so now that you know what a Voronoi structure is… let’s continue with how this very real fruit exhibiting Voronoi structures is telling us.Researchers have noted potential applications including:- Vehicle crash protection
- Packaging (like the phone case in the video short)
- Protective equipment
- High-speed impact mitigation systems
Boston University: Navy-Funded Follow-On Research
The research is funded in part by the US Navy, which, of course, is interested in materials that mitigate impact, shock, and blast loading.
Potential applications include:
- Naval vessel hull protection
- Shock-resistant structures
- Blast mitigation systems
- Electronics protection
- Civilian packaging and consumer products
The Navy-funded project team combines:- Biology
- Materials science
- Computational mechanics
to reproduce the pomelo's energy-absorption mechanisms at engineering scales. Can you see a project leadership connection? Multiple functional groups, needing to work together towards a common goal. So what is biomimicry? In project management terms, it's leveraging nature's ultimate continuous-improvement program—a process refined through millions of years of iterative experimentation, adaptation, and learning (we could call that evolution). Nature has been running Agile sprints long before humans coined the term, testing countless prototypes, discarding what doesn't work, and scaling what does. I will pick up on the project leadership and sustainability piece of this in Part 2.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: June 17, 2026 02:40 PM |
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