Color-Changing Pigments Inspired by Butterflies

Innovation: Industry

Viavi Solutions

Image: Serge van Neck / Unsplash / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

Modify Light/Color

Color in living systems comes from pigments and the interaction of light with surfaces. Color serves many purposes for living systems, such as attracting prey or mates, providing warnings, or protecting through camouflage. To create the effects needed for each purpose, living systems must control the expression or visibility of pigments and the interactions (such as reflectance and refraction) of light. To do so, they have strategies that modify color or light to increase or decrease the color’s position, intensity, opacity, and more. Male hummingbirds, for example, have brightly colored feather patches on their throats; the coloring comes from pigments, structures that refract light, or a combination of the two. When a male hummingbird hovers near a potential mate, it modifies the angle of these feathers to create a bright, colorful display. However, when it needs to mute the colors to reduce conspicuousness, such as to avoid a predator, it modifies the angle again.

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Brochures

Patents

US10048415B2
1.9 MB PDF

True Blues

Explore resources for teaching about physical science and structural color using the story of how butterfly wings inspired paints without pigment.

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ChromaFlair Color Shifting Pigment from Viavi is a multi-layer pigment containing flakes that give paints and other coatings the ability to change color when viewed from different angles.

Benefits

Long-lasting color
Durable
Water resistant

Applications

Automobiles
Consumer goods

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 9: Industry Innovation & Infrastructure
Goal 11: Sustainable Cities & Communities

The Challenge

Color-shifting hues are difficult to manufacture and may use several different types of dyes and pigments to achieve the desired effect. In addition, the color can fade over time, requiring reapplication.

Innovation Details

ChromaFlair® Color Shifting is a unique material consisting of an ultra-thin, multi-layer interference film that forms micron size flakes. Unlike ordinary and many special-effect pigments, ChromaFlair pigment is opaque, thin, flat, and highly specular (mirror-like). ChromaFlair pigment is manufactured by the deposition of ultra-thin layered structures similar to those sometimes found in nature, such as soap bubbles, butterfly wings, or sea shells. Precisely controlling the thickness of the multi-layers in the pigment’s flake structure produces different colors that are highly saturated and bright.

Biological Model

Color in butterfly wings comes from two sources: pigment and structural color. Pigments are chemicals that absorb certain wavelengths of light and reflect others- the wavelengths that are reflected are the colors that you see. The most common are orange, brown, and yellow, which come from melanin, the same pigment that is found in our skin. When light hits an orange butterfly wing, for example, the pigment absorbs all the colors except orange, which is reflected back.