151 - Art of blackness in butterfly wings and sunlight water splitting on an artificial butterfly wing architecture

Tongxiang Fan, txfan@sjtu.edu.cn, Xingmei Guo, Qibin Zhao, Huihui Liu, Di Zhang. State Key Lab of Metal Matrix Composites, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, Shanghai 200240, China

We probe into the art of blackness in butterfly wings by measuring and modeling the antireflection behavior of the black butterfly wing scales. The results demonstrate Mother Nature's excellent talent in devising creations with elaborate architectures and great light harvesting performance. Then as a typical prototype, artificial butterfly wing architecture TiO₂ (ABWA-TiO₂) has been produced using the original butterfly wings as templates and enhanced photocatalytic efficiency has been achieved. The hierarchical architecture borrowed from butterfly wing template works on several levels to enhance catalytic activities of Pt loaded TiO₂ and enhance the hydrogen evolution rate by 2.3 times.This is due to advantages brought about by the hierarchical antireflection architecture.

Monday, March 26, 2012 10:35 AM
Catalysis for Clean Energy Technologies (08:00 AM - 12:25 PM)
Location: San Diego Convention Center
Room: Room 30D