The body color in animals results from billions of years of their natural evolution in order to evade natural enemies, catch quarries or display themselves beauty, in-vestigation on mechanisms of structural light is an important aspect of bionics. Based on the phenomenon of Papilio maackii ménétriès’ blue scales changing into green ones immediately after dropping some alcohol aqua on the underwing sur-face and soon returning back to the original color, the relationship between micro-structure, optics characteristic of scales and changing color effect were studied using the Olympus Stereomicroscope, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and Ultraviolet (UV)-Visible Spectropho-tometer. The color variation mechanisms of blue scales of Papilio maackii mé-nétriès in Chinese Northeast were revealed in this paper. When visible lights trav-eled through the concaver structure with multilayer reflector and the filled medium with different refractive indices, the reflected lights in definite wavelengths pro-duced interference and color at that wavelength came into being. It has important academic reference value to biomimetics design of video stealth materials.
There are billions of tiny scales on the butterfly wings, which array regularly as the tiles on the roof. Such tilts can form various colors of the wing and afford the species many abilities to survive and propagate. Morphological experiments on the wing scales of six butterfly species living in northeast of China were conducted. By the optics microscope; the form, geometry dimension and array of the scales were observed generally. By using scanning electron microscope （SEM）, the 2D scanning and measurement were carried out and the surface micro configurations of scales were observed. The dimension and microstructure characteristics of the cross section of single scale were achieved through transmission electron microscope （TEM）. Finally, by using 3D software, three 3D models were described and the 3D visual effect was achieved. This work can put forward a basic method for the future study on the morphology of biological microstructure.
Li-yan Wu Zhi-wu Han Zhao-mei Qiu Hui-ying Guan Lu-quan Ren
The butterfly Thaumantis diores is a species in the Northeast of China. There are two kinds of scales on its wings, which overlap like roof tiles and completely cover the membrane. The SEM results showed that only Type-I scales play a key role in forming the blue structural color. Type-II scales have black chemical color. The cross section micro-configuration of scales is achieved by using the transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The brilliant blue generated through the multilayer microstructure is explained by the photonic crystal reason. The multilayer microstructure of the ridges is optimized to 1D Bragg stack for simulation. The reflectivity of the wing is measured by a spectrometer, and the experimental graph accord with the simulation curves basically. When this species fly, the wing's color and brightness can change because of the transform between structural color and chemical color. The bionic color-changing design and the significance of this effect in video stealth or other fields are discussed at the end of the paper.
