Harnessing Energy and Engineering: A Review of Design Transition of Bio-Inspired and Conventional Blade Concepts for Wind and Marine Energy Harvesting

The growing demand for sustainable energy has driven innovation in wind and marine turbines, where the conventional airfoils, though reliable, perform poorly in unsteady flows. This review explores the transition of blade design from conventional to bio-inspired blade designs. Although several studies have explored the use of biomimetic principles for turbine blade designs, this review highlights the core biological strategies successfully translated into engineering designs to improve aerodynamic and hydrodynamic performance. In addition, it emphasizes the critical role of interdisciplinary integration, linking biology, material science, and engineering, in advancing and enabling the practical realization of biomimetics in energy systems. This narrative review consolidates the trends, gaps, and underexplored opportunities in the current literature on biomimetics. Theoretically, it elevates bio-inspired design from descriptive analogy into a predictive framework grounded in natural efficiency mechanisms; practically, it articulates a framework for transforming biological design into robust, highly efficient, and commercially viable turbine systems. Further, the review highlighted a persistent gap between experimental advances and commercial deployment, underscoring the lack of scalable manufacturability and techno-economic validation.