Morph-Genetic Materials Inspired from Butterfly Wing Scales

Abstract

As the favorite son of God and a true spirit of nature, the beautiful butterflies win tremendous attention and are also glorified. Butterflies are probably the most conspicuous and attractive group in the insect world. Their subtle patterns and colors have not only contributed to great descriptions in literature since the dawn of civilization, but also have inspired material scientists’ research interest. In this chapter, we expand our work from plant materials to butterfly wings with hierarchical microstructures. It is estimated that there are more than 100,000 species of butterflies in the world, and most of the blue and green colors are from the microstructures in the wing scales, which are called structural colors. Using these butterfly wings as templates, various novel functional materials were fabricated, in which several simple and effective approaches were adopted. Based on these butterfly wings’ replicas, the properties related to their optical characters are studied.