Optical Detection of Vapor Mixtures Using Structurally Colored Butterfly and Moth Wings.

Gábor Piszter,Zsolt Bálint,Krisztián Kertész,László Péter Biró

doi:10.3390/s19143058

Gábor Piszter, Zsolt Bálint + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/s19143058

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Abstract

Photonic nanoarchitectures in the wing scales of butterflies and moths are capable of fast and chemically selective vapor sensing due to changing color when volatile vapors are introduced to the surrounding atmosphere. This process is based on the capillary condensation of the vapors, which results in the conformal change of the chitin-air nanoarchitectures and leads to a vapor-specific optical response. Here, we investigated the optical responses of the wing scales of several butterfly and moth species when mixtures of different volatile vapors were applied to the surrounding atmosphere. We found that the optical responses for the different vapor mixtures fell between the optical responses of the two pure solvents in all the investigated specimens. The detailed evaluation, using principal component analysis, showed that the butterfly-wing-based sensor material is capable of differentiating between vapor mixtures as the structural color response was found to be characteristic for each of them.

Highlights

The efficient detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in current applications is highly needed as monitoring air quality in the living environment is becoming increasingly important [1,2,3,4,5].For the characterization of VOCs in the ambient atmosphere, inexpensive sensors, which combine chemically selective detection with high sensitivity, are required
We investigated in butterfly and moth wings when mixtures of different vapors were applied in the surrounding for the first time how the structural color changes in a wide range of photonic nanoarchitectures atmosphere, and how the optical response developed during this vapor-mixture exposure
To show the efficiency of the discrimination of the butterfly wings, we first used water and on the measured data, we showed that the increasing acetic acid concentration shifts the trajectories in acetic acid vapor mixtures in different concentrations and dilutions, and by using principal component analysis (PCA) on the measured data, we showed that the increasing acetic acid concentration shifts the trajectories in the principal component (PC) scores plot but preserves the initial orientation and monotonic behavior the trajectories, which demonstrates that it is behavior possible the principal component (PC) scores plot butofpreserves the initial orientation and monotonic to discriminate between the acetic acid solutions with concentration differences in all dilutions

Summary

Introduction

The efficient detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in current applications is highly needed as monitoring air quality in the living environment is becoming increasingly important [1,2,3,4,5].For the characterization of VOCs in the ambient atmosphere, inexpensive sensors, which combine chemically selective detection with high sensitivity, are required. The photonic nanoarchitectures in the wing scales of butterflies [22,23], insect cuticles [24], and the barbules of bird feathers [25] were found to exhibit a measurable optical response when the vapor composition of the ambient atmosphere changed. They can be used as sensor materials for vapor detection with an optical readout. Artificial bio-inspired sensor materials were developed [6,7,29]

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