Marine Invertebrate-Inspired Thermal Management: Functional Materials, Structural Architectures, and Integrated Systems

Marine invertebrates exhibit diverse thermoregulatory capabilities enabled by hierarchical architectures, porous skeletal frameworks, and adaptive interfaces. These biological features provide engineering cues for controlling heat conduction, convection, and radiation, particularly when lightweight and multifunctional thermal designs are required. This review surveys marine-invertebrate-inspired thermal management from an engineering perspective and synthesizes biological structure–function relationships into transferable design concepts. Literature was collected from Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Studies were included if they (i) explicitly referenced marine invertebrate morphology, structural organization, interfacial behavior, or adaptive mechanisms and (ii) quantitatively reported thermal metrics such as thermal conductivity, heat capacity/latent heat, heat dissipation performance, or temperature modulation. To maintain biological scope while enabling cross-comparison, the review is organized across major marine invertebrate phyla frequently used in bioinspired engineering—Mollusca, Porifera, Cnidaria, Echinodermata, and Arthropoda—and the engineering literature is classified into three categories: (A) bio-inspired functional materials for thermal transport or optical–thermal control; (B) bio-inspired structural architectures that guide heat flow via hierarchical or porous geometries; and (C) integrated thermal management systems that couple multiple mechanisms at the device or system scale. Across these categories, the reviewed studies demonstrate promising routes toward electronics cooling and aerospace thermal protection. Remaining challenges include scalable fabrication over large areas, flow uniformity in microchannel-based platforms, and long-term reliability under combined pressure, salinity, and thermal cycling.