Sometimes the beginning of the year is a little bit … well … boring. Everyone is working out at the gym and eating healthy green foods, and even though the sun still sets at an ungodly hour, all the festive holiday parties are over.  This admirably disciplined January attitude is great for working off all the pfeffernüsse you shoved in your face and chased with rum-laced egg nog at your Aunt Betty’s house in December, but if you’re not careful all of this new-found rigidity and focus could negatively affect your work.  So if you’re looking to spice up your latest facade design and hey – maybe even your life in general this month, then take a gander at this intriguing “multi-layer, polymeric reflective film that reflects 95%+ of visible light” and that can be used to create snazzy chrome-like, multicolored, and metallic effects in plastics (Source: Inventables.com).

Image courtesy UT Materials Lab & 3M

Radiant light film contains no metal whatsoever, so it’s non-corroding, thermally stable, non-conductive, and won’t produce electro-magnetic interference; it’s a well-mannered material that manages to create a striking effect with a minimum of fuss.  Taking a cue from butterfly wings, the colors in the film are created NOT through the use of pigments but rather through a series of microscopic ridges spaced a few hundred nanometers apart. Variations in the spacing of the ridges produce a range of colors (blue to magenta to gold) though the reflection and interference of different wavelengths of light, and as a result the material appears to change hue as you adjust your viewing angle.

Radiant light film is nothing if not versatile: it can be “embossed, die cut, sheet slit, precision cut, surface treated, dyed, coated to be heat sealed, coated with adhesive, printed and extruded into plastics. It can be combined with suitable color substrates to produce various vibrant colors in both reflection and transmission” (Inventables.com).  Hell – you can even turn the stuff into yarn and knit it into a sweater if you’re so inclined, according to manufacturer, 3M.

UN Studio’s La Defense, Almere

Technology: 3M Radiant Colour/Light Film.
Using radiant colour film to create interference colour.

So far the film has found applications in home décor, packaging, automotive trim and accents, computers, mobile phones and advertising media, and inspired by UN Studio, I think we should wrap some buildings with it. And then let’s go have some cookies because we all knew I’d never make it to March let alone 2013 on this ridiculous salad-filled healthy diet and I’m sore from doing pushups.

WU XING

I have filed Radiant Light film under Water and Wood. It’s flexible, reflective, and it interviews well.

Get Radiant Light Film from Inventables.

Images courtesy amnh.org and vipnyc.org 

Pinned up along one side of the wall was a row of brilliantly colored butterflies.  They were so glittery and shiny and their patterns so vivid in color that I wanted to sew a coat out of their wings and wear it for the rest of my life.  But I abandoned the idea, reasoning that the colors would probably fade with time and also because a coat made of insect parts is gross.

Fast forward to today and the butterfly wing coat idea is still gross.  However, I did find out that the colors on butterfly wings don’t fade because … wait for it … they are made of crystal nanostructures called gyroids.  “These are ‘mind-bendingly weird’ three-dimensional curving structures that selectively scatter light,” according to Richard Prum, chair and the William Robertson Coe Professor in the Department of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale (Source: Physorg.com). Geometrically speaking, a gyroid is “an infinitely connected triply periodic minimal surfacediscovered by Alan Schoen in 1970″ (Wikipedia) and it’s highly awesome.  You can think of it as a network of “three bladed boomerangs” if that helps (Physorg.com). 

Image courtesy Wikipedia

The gyroids on butterfly wings are made of chitin, which is a tough starchy material that forms the exterior of insects and crustaceans.  The chitin that makes up the exoskeletons of crabs and scorpions is typically deposited on the outer membranes of cells, and it doesn’t usually take the form of a gyroid. 

The Yale research team used an X-ray scattering technique at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois to determine that, “essentially, the outer membranes of the butterfly wing scale cells grow and fold into the interior of the cells. The membranes then form a double gyroid — or two, mirror-image networks shaped by the outer and inner cell membranes. The latter are easier to grow but are not as good at scattering light. Chitin is then deposited in the outer gyroid to create a single solid crystal. The cell then dies, leaving behind the crystal nanostructures on the butterfly wing” (Physorg.com). 

Okay, so the crystal nanostructures come in pretty colors and they’re durable.  But the most exciting aspect of this line of research has to do with solar cells.  Gyroid shapes can improve the efficiency of solar cells and other optical devices. 

Image Credit: Michael Apel, Wikipedia Commons

Researcher Di Zhang and colleagues are turning to the microscopic solar scales on butterfly wings in their search for materials that may improve the already high efficiency of light-harvesting in dye-sensitized solar cells, also known as Grätzel cells after inventor Michael Grätzel. These solar cells can convert 10% of the light energy that strikes them into electricity (Source: ACS). 

Di Zhang and co. used natural butterfly wings as a mold or template to make copies of the solar collectors, and transferred those light-harvesting structures to Grätzel cells. “Laboratory tests showed that the butterfly wing solar collector absorbed light more efficiently than conventional dye-sensitized cells. The fabrication process is simpler and faster than other methods, and could be used to manufacture other commercially valuable devices, the researchers say” (ACS).  The more efficient our solar cells become, the fewer of them we’ll need to manufacture – meaning less waste, less space, less time, and more betterness.

WU XING:

I’m always distracted by things that are shiny. I’m placing this post in the fire category.

Cited:

“Novel Photoanode Structure Templated from Butterfly Wing Scales”, Chemistry of Materials. Provided by ACS via Physorg.com.  Accessed 06/15/10.  URL.

“Colors of Butterfly Wing Yield Clues to Light-Altering Structures” Provided by Yale University via Physorg.com.  Accessed 06/15/10.  URL.