The moth eye will help create an anti-reflective coating. Free Technical Library News

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The moth's eye will help create an anti-reflective coating

29.12.2017

Shin-Tson Wu from the University of Central Florida, USA, proposed a new method for creating anti-reflective coatings, modeled on the structure of insect eyes - it is known that the eyes of moths do not reflect light.

Intensive research into low-reflectivity surfaces has been going on for a long time. So-called transflective LCDs reduce reflections by covering both backlight and ambient light. Another approach, called adaptive glare control, uses sensors to increase the brightness of the screen. But both of these technologies eat up battery power and are not very efficient. According to the researcher, the anatomy of the moth's eye offers a much more elegant solution.

When passing from one medium to another, light is refracted - it changes the direction of propagation, which is due to the difference in the values of the characteristics of these media, called the refractive index. If this difference is large, as when light from air strikes glass, most of the incident light is reflected. But the eye of a moth is covered with tiny uniform tubercles that refract the incident light gradually. Incident light waves interfere with each other, mutually extinguishing each other, which is why the eye is seen as dark.

Wu Shinzon's group at National Taiwan University has created a silica mold with a surface that mimics the surface of a moth's eye and is using it to create strong dimpled coatings on flexible sheets. Although these pits are not convex, like the tubercles of an insect's eye, but concave, they dampen the reflection in the same way. In tests, this material showed a reflection coefficient of less than 1%.

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