Every year, billions of birds collide with windows, often resulting in their death, as well as in significant material damage. However, many animal species have developed photonic structures active in the UV due to their perception of light in this wavelength range. These structures allow us to elaborate new optimised coatings for selective UV reflection through a bioinspiration approach. These bioinspired coatings consist of a periodic multilayer of metal oxide layers deposited on soda-lime glass with patterns. The optical response of the multilayers was numerically optimised in terms of morphology and material composition using human and avian colour perception models.
Natural photonic structures found on the cuticle of insects are known to give rise to astonishing structural colours. These ordered porous structures are made of biopolymers, such as chitin, and some of them possess the property to change colour according to the surrounding atmosphere composition. This phenomenon is still not completely understood. We investigated the structure found on the cuticle of the male beetle Hoplia coerulea (Scarabaeidae). The structure, in this case, consists in a 1D periodic porous multilayer inside scales, reflecting incident light in the blue. The colour variations were quantified by reflectance spectral measurements using water, ethanol and acetone vapours. A 1D scattering matrix formalism was used for modelling light reflection on the photonic multilayer. The origin of the reported colour changes has to be tracked in variations of the effective refractive index and of the photonic structure dimensions. This remarkable phenomenon observed for a non-open but still porous multilayer could be very interesting for vapour sensing applications and smart glass windows.
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