Artificial phototropism for omnidirectional tracking and harvesting of light
| Autor: | Michal Marszewski, Xu Wang, Yunyun Yang, Tiphaine Galy, Ximin He, Hanqing Jiang, Mutian Hua, Hamsini Gopalakrishna, Laurent Pilon, Yousif Alsaid, Jinsong Cui, Ning Liu, Yusen Zhao, Xiaoshi Qian |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
Nastic movements
business.industry Computer science Biomedical Engineering Control reconfiguration Bioengineering 02 engineering and technology Feedback loop 010402 general chemistry 021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology Condensed Matter Physics Smart material 01 natural sciences Ray Atomic and Molecular Physics and Optics 0104 chemical sciences Optics Oblique illumination General Materials Science Electrical and Electronic Engineering 0210 nano-technology Omnidirectional antenna business Phototropism |
| Zdroj: | Nature nanotechnology. 14(11) |
| ISSN: | 1748-3395 |
| Popis: | Many living organisms track light sources and halt their movement when alignment is achieved. This phenomenon, known as phototropism, occurs, for example, when plants self-orient to face the sun throughout the day. Although many artificial smart materials exhibit non-directional, nastic behaviour in response to an external stimulus, no synthetic material can intrinsically detect and accurately track the direction of the stimulus, that is, exhibit tropistic behaviour. Here we report an artificial phototropic system based on nanostructured stimuli-responsive polymers that can aim and align to the incident light direction in the three-dimensions over a broad temperature range. Such adaptive reconfiguration is realized through a built-in feedback loop rooted in the photothermal and mechanical properties of the material. This system is termed a sunflower-like biomimetic omnidirectional tracker (SunBOT). We show that an array of SunBOTs can, in principle, be used in solar vapour generation devices, as it achieves up to a 400% solar energy-harvesting enhancement over non-tropistic materials at oblique illumination angles. The principle behind our SunBOTs is universal and can be extended to many responsive materials and a broad range of stimuli. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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