Source-Tech-Times
The larger blue-ringed octopus can change the size and colour of its namesake patterns on its skin in a split second for signalling, deception, and concealment. This natural marvel served as an inspiration for researchers at the University of California, Irvine, who created a technical platform with comparable features for use in the robotics, medical, military, and renewable energy sectors.
The inventors claim that the dynamically tunable fluorescent and spectroscopic qualities, ease of production, and potential for scaling to regions big enough to cover automobiles, billboards, and even buildings, will be advantages of the new gadgets made available by this breakthrough.
A paper on the bio-inspired invention was just released in Nature Communications.
The blue-ringed octopus species Hapalochlaena lunulata is indigenous to the Indian and Western Pacific oceans.
It may deter predators with a flash of its blue rings and stuns prey with a venom that contains neurotoxins.
The UCI researchers were drawn in by these iridescent rings on a brown background on the creature’s skin.
Blue-Ringed Octopus-Inspired Engineering:
“The processes that allow the blue-ringed octopus to quickly change its skin markings between hidden and exposed states intrigue us,” senior co-author Alon Gorodetsky, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCI, stated.
“For this project, we worked to mimic the octopus’ natural abilities with devices from unique materials we synthesised in our laboratory, and the result is an octopus-inspired deception and signalling system that is straightforward to fabricate, functions for a long time when operated continuously, and can even repair itself when damaged.”
The design of the invention involves a thin layer made up of brown circles with wrinkled blue rings around them, resembling the rings on a blue-ringed octopus. This layer is positioned between an acrylic membrane and a transparent proton-conducting electrode on top, with another electrode of the same type beneath.
The researchers have demonstrated their technological ingenuity by investigating the application of acenes, which are organic molecules composed of linearly fused benzene rings, at the molecular level.
According to Gorodetsky, the team’s usage of designer nonacene-like molecules (which have nine linearly fused rings) contributes to some of the platform’s exceptional features.
“For our devices, we designed and conceptualised a nonacene-like molecule with a unique architecture,” stated Preeta Pratakshya, a co-lead author and recent Ph.D. graduate of UCI’s Department of Chemistry.
“Acenes are organic hydrocarbon molecules with a host of advantageous characteristics, including ease of synthesis, tunable electronic characteristics, and controllable optical properties.”
“Our nonacene-like molecules are exceptional among acenes,” she continued, “because they can withstand a day of continuous bright light irradiation in air as well as years of storage in air.” Under such severe circumstances, no other expanded acene exhibits this combined long-term stability.”
Gorodetsky claims that the molecules that are utilised to create the coloured blue ring layer give the devices their most advantageous characteristics, such as spectroscopic properties that can be adjusted, ease of benchtop manufacturing, and stability in an ambient environment when illuminated.
“Our co-author Sahar Sharifzadeh, a Boston University professor of electrical and computer engineering, demonstrated that the stimuli-responsive properties of the molecules can be computationally predicted, which opens paths for the in silico design of other camouflage technologies,” Gorodetsky stated.
The team discovered that the bioinspired devices could self-repair on their own without assistance and could change their visible appearance over 500 times with little to no degradation in their laboratory tests, many of which took place in UCI’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.
According to Gorodetsky, the invention was shown to have a desirable mix of capabilities in the visible light, ultraviolet, and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This would allow the devices to covertly signal onlookers or conceal other things from detection.
“The photophysical robustness and general processability of our nonacene-like molecule — and presumably its variants — opens opportunities for future investigation of these compounds within the context of traditional optoelectronic systems such as light-emitting diodes and solar cells,” said.
Gorodetsky and Pratakshya were joined in this study by the following individuals: David Josh Dibble and Anthony Burke in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCI; Philip Denison in the Department of Chemistry at UCI; Aliya Mukazhanova and Sharifzadeh of Boston University; and Chengyi Xu, Panyiming Liu, Reina Kurakake, and Robert Lopez in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UCI. Funding was given by the National Science Foundation, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Office of Naval Research.
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