Shark-inspired chemical sensors

The scientists hope their research could be used in future to design chemical sensors for underwater exploration, medicine and counter-terrorism.

Dr Jonathan Cox from the university’s Department of Chemistry has been working with researchers from Cambridge University and the Natural History Museum in London, testing a scale model of a hammerhead shark in a flow tank to see how the water flows around the nasal cavity of its strange flattened head.

The model was created using a CT scan of a shark’s head from the Natural History Museum’s collection, which was then used in a 3D printer to make an accurate model of the head and nasal cavity.

Dr Cox said: ‘Whereas humans use their lungs like bellows to inhale air through their noses to smell, the hammerhead shark smells as it swims forwards, propelling water through its nose.

‘The nasal cavity of the hammerhead is like a labyrinth of pipes, with a central U-shaped channel and lots of smaller channels leading off it. The smaller channels contain the olfactory receptors and so we’re looking at how the water flows through these channels as the shark swims forwards.’