Nature Inspires Robust Bicontinuous Materials
Materials science and engineering researchers at Cornell University are drawing inspiration from living systems like birds and insects. See how their findings may influence the future design of functional synthetic materials.
“In a sponge, fluid and solid are interwoven,” said Eric Dufresne , professor of materials science and engineering and of physics at Cornell. “Together, they can do more than the sum of their parts. Bringing together two materials in a similar way at the nanoscale can unlock new functionalities, but presents all sorts of challenges.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 many birds make beautiful colors in their feathers by the interaction of light with these amazing bicontinuous materials I'm Eric dufrain I'm a professor in Material Science and Engineering as well as the department of physics so literally a by continuous structure uh looks like a sponge the structures that we're making in the lab and the ones that have inspired Us in
00:00:21 bir feathers are like a sponge but shrunken down to a tiny scale soft materials are really interesting because they're the main type of materials that nature has utilized to make human beings as Engineers we normally focus on stiffer types of materials like semiconductors and Ceramics and metals and so we don't know a lot about how uh nature successfully uses these materials
00:00:47 to make the robust devices that are us so over the years we first tried to figure out why these bicontinuous materials could make beautiful colors and after we figured that out we were much longer have been puzzled and inspired by the ability of the birds to make these crazy structures in the first place and in bird feathers it's more than just the structure of these
00:01:09 bicontinuous materials that matters but also compositions of the individual components one important feature that they do is combine aspects of absorption of light as well as defraction of light with a very simple geometry we demonstrated how this combination of both absorption and defraction can create unique and vibrant colors we look at living systems and try to understand
00:01:32 how they work through the eyes of Material Science from there we take inspiration to try to develop new materials synthetic materials that utilize the same design principles that have emerged in evolution