Engineering designer materials with bird-inspired structural colors using nanoparticle-based supraballs
Originally published by Thamarasee Jeewandar a, Phys.org, on April 27, 2023 Effect of monodisperse binary nanoparticle mixture (220nm-diameter melanin and 220nm-diameter silica; melanin, blue spheres; silica, yellow spheres) composition and mixing state on the supraball color reflectance. -- (A) Visualizations of the cross-section of binary mixture supraballs with varying levels of particle mixing in the increasing order from top to bottom and varying relative proportion of silica in the increasing order from left to right. (B) Corresponding structural colors, represented as RGB color panels, of the binary mixture supraballs. Credit: Science Advances, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adf2859 Materials scientists are often bioinspired, and in a new study, bird-inspired by structural colors exhibited by avian species to form non-iridescent nanoparticle assemblies. Such nanoparticle mixtures varying in particle chemistry and size can affect the color produced to identify struc