Abstract Summary
Spider webs are multifunctional tools. Besides capturing prey, spiders monitor vibration in the web to localize prey. Spiders have an evolutionary benefit of improving monitoring, because better information processing leads to more caught prey, leading to higher chances for survival. Based on this, combined with the costly energy requirements of signaling, biologists observe that the spider’s web operates as an Extended Cognition of the spider's Central Nervous System. Here an Extended Cognition means that the web filters signals to make decoding information easier. Spider webs contain characteristic design patterns, such as an eccentric location of the central hub. This paper investigates how this eccentricity influences the dynamic response of web-like structures, thus enabling Extended Cognition. A numerical model of spider web-inspired structures is used to attain the Structural Health Monitoring related insights and new sensing approaches found from the signaling capabilities of spider webs. Modeling consists of modal analyses in FEM on web-like structures where a mass is iteratively moved across all nodes. This yields the natural frequencies of the structure depending on the mass location. Analysis shows that the natural frequency forms patterns based on the mass location, and more importantly, it shows how these patterns become more intricate by including eccentricity. The resulting maximum change in natural frequency grows as the eccentricity in the design grows. This shows that eccentricity influences the dynamic response such that damage identification is enhanced.
