Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Centre for Energy Research, P.O. Box 49, H-1525 Budapest, Hungary.
Hungarian Natural History Museum, 13 Baross St., H-1088 Budapest, Hungary.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 Jul 11;19(14):3058. doi: 10.3390/s19143058.
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.
蝴蝶和飞蛾翅膀鳞片中的光子纳米结构能够快速且有选择性地感应化学蒸气，因为当挥发性蒸气被引入周围大气中时，其颜色会发生变化。这一过程基于蒸气的毛细冷凝，其导致了几丁质-空气纳米结构的保形变化，并导致了特定于蒸气的光学响应。在这里，我们研究了当不同挥发性蒸气混合物施加到周围大气时，几种蝴蝶和飞蛾物种翅膀鳞片的光学响应。我们发现，对于所有被调查的样本，不同蒸气混合物的光学响应都落在两种纯溶剂的光学响应之间。使用主成分分析的详细评估表明，基于蝴蝶翅膀的传感器材料能够区分蒸气混合物，因为结构色响应被发现对每种蒸气混合物都具有特征。
