Debashis Chanda, a professor in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center, drew his inspiration from butterflies to create the first environmentally friendly, large-scale and multicolour alternative to pigment-based colourants, which could contribute to energy-saving efforts and help reduce global warming.
“The range of colours and hues in the natural world are astonishing — from colourful flowers, birds and butterflies to underwater creatures like fish and cephalopods,” Chanda said.
“Structural colour serves as the primary colour-generating mechanism in several extremely vivid species where geometrical arrangement of typically two colourless materials produces all colours. On the other hand, with manmade pigment, new molecules are needed for every colour present.”
Based on such bio-inspirations, Chanda’s research group innovated a plasmonic paint, which uses nanoscale structural arrangement of colourless materials – aluminium and aluminium oxide – instead...