Bio-inspired intelligent structural color materials

Abstract

Bioinspired structural color materials represent a curiosity-led, technology-driven field with multidisciplinary research studies aiming at mimicking and recapitulating natural coloration and functions. Over the past several decades, great achievements have been made, including natural structural coloration mechanisms, fabrication of artificial structural color materials, and their applications in extensive areas. In very recent years, research has been propelled forward towards making structural color materials intelligent by incorporating fascinating functions such as self-healing, autonomous regulation, shape memory, etc. These accomplishments create a great leap for structural color materials being applied in real-life scenarios and devices such as in anti-counterfeiting, displays, sensors, soft robots, wearable electronics, organ-on-a-chip platforms, etc.