Butterfly effects: novel functional materials inspired from the wings scales

Abstract

Through millions of years of evolutionary selection, nature has created biological materials with various functional properties for survival. Many complex natural architectures, such as shells, bones, and honeycombs, have been studied and imitated in the design and fabrication of materials with enhanced hardness and stiffness. Recently, more and more researchers have started to research the wings of butterflies, mostly because of their dazzling colors. It was found that most of these iridescent colors are caused by periodic photonic structures on the scales that make up the surfaces of these wings. These materials have recently become a focus of multidiscipline research because of their promising applications in the display of structural colors, and in advanced sensors, photonic crystals, and solar cells. This paper review aims to provide a perspective overview of the research inspired by these wing structures in recent years.

Hierarchically porous materials: synthesis strategies and structure design

“…Another example is the fabrication of bio-inspired butterfly wings with diverse brilliant colors caused by hierarchical architectures. 724,[733][734][735][736][737][738][739][740] Most recently, a hierarchically porous structured system has been constructed by controlled assembly of light-harvesting plasmonic nanoantennas onto a typical photocatalytic unit with butterfly wings' hiererarchical architectures. 88 Fan et al demonstrated that different hierarchical structures of butter flys' wings can act as macro-templating to fabricate the hierarchically porous BiVO 4 /Au nanocomposite ( Fig.…”

“…855 A range of fibrous templates are the collagen-based matrix obtained from natural materials such as above mentioned avian eggshells. 711,716,735,736 Electrospun fibrous polymer mats can be applied as templates to prepare a range of materials (organic, inorganic or composites) with pore sizes on multiple length scales. For example, electrospun poly(L-lactide) (PLA) fibers with a diameter between 0.3-3.5 mm have pores on the surface with an average size of 100 nm in width and 250 nm in length.…”

An Ingenious Super Light Trapping Surface Templated from Butterfly Wing Scales

“…Nature offers a variety of surfaces with brilliant properties and is a source of inspiration for numerous applications and techniques. A number of researchers have paid close attention to the fantastic surfaces triggered by nature, such as the anisotropy of the rice leaves [1,2], the self-cleaning of the lotus leaves [3][4][5], the antireflection of moth eyes [6][7][8], the fog collection system in cactus [9,10], the reversible adhesive of the gecko feet [11,12], the superhydrophobicity of the water strider legs [13,14], and the iridescence of the butterfly wings [15][16][17]. Mimicking or studying the basic principles of the sophisticated tactics from nature is of significant importance for the design of artificial analogs.…”

Hydrothermal Synthesis Au-Bi2Te3 Nanocomposite Thermoelectric Film with a Hierarchical Sub-Micron Antireflection Quasi-Periodic Structure

“…In addition, these TE film just possess the single function of generating electrical power from heat or cooling from electric energy. Encouragingly, biomimetic gives a successful solution to overcome these restrictions [ 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ]. Because nature provides us a multitude of remarkable biological materials, through billions of years of evolution, and biomimetics transfer optimum designs in nature to technical application.…”