Deconstructed beetles: Bilayered composite materials produce green coloration with remarkably high near-infrared reflectance

L Ospina-Rozo; N Priscilla; J Hutchison; A van de Meene; NW Roberts; D Stuart-Fox; A Roberts

Journal article

Deconstructed beetles: Bilayered composite materials produce green coloration with remarkably high near-infrared reflectance

L Ospina-Rozo, N Priscilla, J Hutchison, A van de Meene, NW Roberts, D Stuart-Fox, A Roberts

Materials Today Advances | ELSEVIER | Published : 2023

DOI: 10.1016/j.mtadv.2023.100363

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Abstract

Beetle elytra (hardened forewings) are a promising source of inspiration to develop or enhance the performance of human-fabricated composite materials. The structures responsible for optical properties in the ultra-violet to visible spectrum (300–700 nm) have been extensively characterised, but we have limited knowledge of optical properties and their physical origin in the near-infrared (NIR; 700–1700 nm). We examined the elytra of three species of green scarab beetles (Xylonichus eucalypti, Anoplognathus prasinus and Paraschizognathus olivaceus) with very high NIR reflectance. We manually separated layers in the elytra to disambiguate their contributions to the overall optical response. We..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

James Hutchison Author

Allison van de Meene Author

Devi Stuart-Fox Author

Ann Roberts Author

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ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS)

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ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS)

Grants

Awarded by Air Force Office of Scientific Research

Funding Acknowledgements

Funding from the Australian Research Council (grant numbers DP190102203, FT180100216, and FT180100295) and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence Scheme (grant number CE200100010) , the research grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) /Eu-ropean Office of Aerospace Research and Development (EOARD) (grant number FA9550-19-1-70 05) to N.W.R and the University of Melbourne Bioinspiration Hallmark Research Initiative. These funding sources facilitated equipment and talent acquisition but were not involved in the study design, data collection or analysis, manuscript preparation or decision to submit.