A Study on the Radiation Cooling Characteristics of Cerambycini Latreille.

The severe climate and energy issues require more environmentally friendly and efficient cooling methods. Radiative cooling offers a cooling solution with significant advantages. However, current radiative cooling technologies focus primarily on seeking perfect materials to achieve complete wavelength absorption. However, numerous research studies have shown that achieving such a perfect scenario is not feasible. Here, inspired by the surface of the Cerambycini Latreille, the inherent mechanism of radiative cooling functionality in the unique structure of these hairs is revealed using effective medium theory and Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) optical simulation analysis. Through alkaline etching and template methods, a biomimetic radiative cooling film (BRCF) was successfully fabricated. The BRCF not only efficiently reflects solar radiation but also enhances absorption in the atmospheric window wavelength range. The radiative cooling mechanism proposed in this study and the BRCF presented here may inspire researchers to further explore the field of structural radiative cooling.

Reconfigurable Fiber Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Self-Powered Defect Detection.

With the extensive applications of portable, wearable, and stretchable electronics, the fiber triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) has been developed particularly and rapidly. However, variable stiffness or even switchable stiffness for the fiber TENG is also urgently needed in some specific service conditions. Here, the functional, reconfigurable fiber TENG is presented for harvesting mechanical energy and self-powered sensors. It is mainly composed of soft tubes with filled low-melting-point alloy (LMPA), conductive wire, and electrically heated wire. Under an input frequency of 3 Hz, this fiber TENG produces a maximum peak power density of 348.5 µW/m. Due to its excellent reconfigurable characteristics, it can be switched back and forth in many different application situations. It can be intelligently used not only as a self-powered tactile and mechanical sensor but also as a self-powered splint for postdisaster relief work. Besides, the cracking detection of a gear and a lead screw is also realized using this fiber TENG. This work strongly promotes the application of variable stiffness LMPAs in the TENG, especially for the reconfigurable fiber TENG. It also promotes the potential self-powered applications of the TENG in the fields of sensors and detection, such as mechanical flaw detection and self-powered tactile detection.

Low-Temperature, Efficient Synthesis of Highly Crystalline Urchin-like Tantalum Diboride Nanoflowers.

Urchin-like tantalum diboride (TaB2) nanoflowers were successfully synthesized via a high-efficiency and energy-saving methodology, molten-salt and microwave co-modified boro/carbothermal reduction, using less expensive B4C as a reducing agent. By taking advantage of the synergistic effects of the molten-salt medium and microwave heating conditions, the onset formation temperature of TaB2 was drastically reduced to below 1000 °C, and phase-pure powders of TaB2 nanoflowers were obtained at temperatures as low as 1200 °C within only 20 min. Notably, the present temperature conditions were remarkably milder than those (>1500 °C for several hours) required by conventional reduction methods, which use the strong, but expensive, reducing agent, elemental boron. The resulting urchin-like TaB2 nanoflowers consisted of numerous uniform single-crystalline nanowires with lengths up to 4.16 µm, and high aspect ratios >10. This result indicated that the as-synthesized urchin-like TaB2 nanoflowers possessed high specific surface area and anisotropic morphology, which were favorable not only for sintering, but also for toughening their bulk counterparts.

Large-Scale Bio-Inspired Flexible Antireflective Film with Scale-Insensitivity Arrays.

Natural creatures can always provide perfect strategies for excellent antireflection (AR), which is valuable for photovoltaic industry, optical devices, and flexible displays. However, limited by precision, it is still difficult to guarantee the consistency between the artificial structures and the original biological structures. Here, a novel large-scale flexible AR film is inspired by the cicada wings and successfully fabricated with a recycled template. On the one hand, the adjustable structures on porous templates make it possible to optimize the design of AR structure parameters toward the practical demand. On the other hand, it breaks the limitation of the biological organism size, accomplishing the replication of AR nanostructure units in a large scale. Interestingly, even if the film is covered by enlarged dome cone arrays, it still maintains almost perfect AR property, achieving excellent scale-insensitivity AR performance. This work numerically and experimentally investigates its scale-insensitivity AR performance in detail. Compared with subwavelength nanocones, enlarged cones change the original optical behaviors, and the proportion of transmitted light is reduced while scattering and absorption increase. Based on this, these bio-inspired scale-insensitivity AR arrays could be used in flexible displays, photothermic conversion, solar cells, and so on.

Broader-Band and Flexible Antireflective Films with the Window-like Structures Inspired by the Backside of Butterfly Wing Scales.

Antireflective performance is critical for most optical devices, such as the efficient solar energy utilization in photovoltaic cells of an aerospace craft and optical displays of scientific precise equipment. Therein, outstanding broad-band antireflection is one of the most crucial properties for antireflection films (ARFs). Unfortunately, it is still a challenging work to realize perfect "broader-band" antireflection because both the low refractive indices materials and time-consuming nanotexturing technologies are required in the fabricating process. Even in this case, a broader-band and flexible ARF with hierarchical structures is successfully developed, which is inspired by butterfly wing scales. First, the butterfly wings surface is treated with acid and stuck on a clean glass. Now, all the scales on the wings will form a strong adhesion with the glass substrate. Then, the wings are removed and the scales are left on the glass slide. Now the backside of scales is facing outward, the backside structures of the scales are coincidentally used as the template. Finally, the structure is replicated and the ARF with a controllable thickness is successfully fabricated by rotating PDMS on the biological template. In this work, the bionic ARFs realize the transmission of nearly 90% and more than 90% in the visible light and infrared region. It enhanced transmission to 13% under standard illumination compared with flat PDMS films of the same thickness. Furthermore, the ARF is flexible enough that it could bend nearly 180° to meet the special antireflection requirements in some extreme conditions. It is expected that this bioinspired AR film could revolutionize the technologies of broader-band antireflective materials and impact numerous applications from glass displays to optoelectronic devices.

Fractal analysis for reduced reference image quality assessment.

In this paper, multifractal analysis is adapted to reduced-reference image quality assessment (RR-IQA). A novel RR-QA approach is proposed, which measures the difference of spatial arrangement between the reference image and the distorted image in terms of spatial regularity measured by fractal dimension. An image is first expressed in Log-Gabor domain. Then, fractal dimensions are computed on each Log-Gabor subband and concatenated as a feature vector. Finally, the extracted features are pooled as the quality score of the distorted image using l1 distance. Compared with existing approaches, the proposed method measures image quality from the perspective of the spatial distribution of image patterns. The proposed method was evaluated on seven public benchmark data sets. Experimental results have demonstrated the excellent performance of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches.