Structure-function relationships for squid skin-inspired wearable thermoregulatory materials

Panyiming Liu; Erica M Leung; Mohsin Ali Badshah; Christopher S Moore; Alon A Gorodetsky

doi:10.1063/5.0149289

Structure-function relationships for squid skin-inspired wearable thermoregulatory materials

APL Bioeng. 2023 Nov 6;7(4):046111. doi: 10.1063/5.0149289. eCollection 2023 Dec.

Authors

Panyiming Liu¹, Erica M Leung², Mohsin Ali Badshah², Christopher S Moore³, Alon A Gorodetsky

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA.
² Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA.
³ Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University, Orange, California 92866, USA.

Abstract

Wearable thermoregulatory technologies have attracted widespread attention because of their potential for impacting individual physiological comfort and for reducing building energy consumption. Within this context, the study of materials and systems that can merge the advantageous characteristics of both active and passive operating modes has proven particularly attractive. Accordingly, our laboratory has drawn inspiration from the appearance-changing skin of Loliginidae (inshore squids) for the introduction of a unique class of dynamic thermoregulatory composite materials with outstanding figures of merit. Herein, we demonstrate a straightforward approach for experimentally controlling and computationally predicting the adaptive infrared properties of such bioinspired composites, thereby enabling the development and validation of robust structure-function relationships for the composites. Our findings may help unlock the potential of not only the described materials but also comparable systems for applications as varied as thermoregulatory wearables, food packaging, infrared camouflage, soft robotics, and biomedical sensing.