Because of its size, high segmentation within the global market and challenges driving its development, the separation technology sector could benefit from a bio-inspired approach to innovation to create more efficient and sustainable solutions. The potential for bio-inspired innovation is still largely untapped and Biologically-Inspired Design (BID) methods and tools are still largely underutilised, especially within the industry. A new BID method, called Guild-Based (GB) BID, is proposed to create a database of a large set of biological solutions – identified by a function – where biological information is structured to be more effective and usable within the industrial environment. A database for the separation technology sector has been set up and populated with 118 relevant biological solutions responding to the main function ‘to separate’. The database has been utilised to generate several clusters of solutions depending on the level of detail of the formulated problem. In particular, these include broad design principles of separation, taxonomies of biological solutions for specific separation problems and novel design concepts for two specific separation technologies (a desalination technology and an antibacterial surface). Furthermore, because of a large dataset of biological solutions, the possibility of determining the frequency of occurrence of specific separation strategies in nature can trigger reflections on the impact of existing separation technologies and taking decisions on future related R&D paths. More tests need to be conducted in the industrial environment; however, the results achieved so far indicate that the method proposed can indeed be instrumental to generating innovative ideas of interest to the separation technology sector.

由于其规模、在全球市场中的高度细分以及推动其发展的挑战，分离技术行业可以从生物启发的创新方法中受益，以创建更高效​​和可持续的解决方案。生物启发创新的潜力在很大程度上仍未开发，生物启发设计 (BID) 方法和工具在很大程度上仍未得到充分利用，尤其是在行业内。提出了一种称为 Guild-Based (GB) BID 的新 BID 方法，以创建一个包含大量生物解决方案的数据库（由功能识别），其中生物信息的结构在工业环境中更加有效和可用。分离技术部门的数据库已经建立并填充了 118 种相关的生物解决方案，以响应“分离”的主要功能。该数据库已被用于根据所制定问题的详细程度生成多个解决方案集群。特别是，这些包括广泛的分离设计原则、针对特定分离问题的生物解决方案分类以及两种特定分离技术（脱盐技术和抗菌表面）的新设计概念。此外，由于生物解决方案的大量数据集，确定自然界中特定分离策略发生频率的可能性可以引发对现有分离技术影响的反思，并就未来相关的研发路径做出决策。需要在工业环境中进行更多的测试；然而，