How Butterfly Wings Can Inspire New High-Tech Surfaces

The topic that I choose was called how butterfly wings can inspire new high-tech surfaces in the Science Daily they was talking about how this South American butterfly how it just flapped it’s wings and caused a flurry of nanotechnology research to happen in Ohio. They also talk about what type of butterfly to because of it color. When I was reading this article the researchers had this thing that made them want to studied butterfly wings and also rice leaves and how their texture can make different products work better. They was trying to make the butterfly wings texture look real on a surface that is plastic. In the journal Soft Matter that Ohio State University they made this texture fluid that would stop the surface from getting dirty and make it look like the real high-teach stuff. They use the Blue Morpho because it is a known butterfly and of it beautiful color so the people that was studying the butterfly notice that it able to keep dirt also water with its wings. Bhushan says that since the butterfly lives in the nature it’s hard for them to stay clean. The butterfly wings are so fragile anything that gets on their wings can make it difficult for them to fly. Bhushan was talking about that how the males and females know each other by its color and the pattern that is how they reproduce. When you look at the wings under you might think that it is smooth but it’s more like roof that is overlapping. The rice leaf looks more like a landscape when you look at it under the microscope which has this wax coating that makes the water drops fall strait down the leaf. The researchers took the two the butterfly wings and the rice leave to see what would be best for texture. After they did all that they made silicon and also plastic to make it look like the rice leave then put this special coating called nanoparticles. They was doing all these test so see which texture that had the nanoparticles for less water to fall on it and was comparing it to the non coated surface the rice leave was 26 percent and the butterfly wing was 15 percent. Then they put this stuff called caribide powder to see how easy it was to clean the surfaces. Then they measure how long that they was under the water then counted the amount of particles was on it before and after they washed it. The leaf came out to 95 percent then the butterfly wing was 85 percent so when you look at it only 70 percent came of the flat surface. So after all this Bhushan thinks that the rice leaf texture would be better for making the fluid go through certain pipes and the Blue Morpho lovely wings texture might be better for medical equipment that can help stop bacteria growth. Why I choose this article is because I love butterfly and to know that they can help the world makes me like them more. They can change our world today and make it better and improve thing also.      

-Angelique Delarosa