New insights into cellulose photonics-from green routes to colloidal particles and cross-linking to colour responsive materials
| Dates: | 15 November 2023 |
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| Times: | 12:00 - 13:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Photon Science Institute |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Dr. Ahu Gumrah-Parry |
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Join us for this PSI seminar with guest speaker Dr. Ahu Gumrah-Parry. Nature mastered the use of biopolymers to create highly complex 3D structures and optimized their optical responses to build multi-functional materials that act as soft devices of biology. Synthetic mimics of such structures still lack nature's diversity in terms of functionality and fabrication abilities. By studying the material manipulation and the self-organisation of natural building blocks we can learn so much from the nature’s design strategies. One of the most studied building blocks our work and one of the most abundant biopolymers on earth in the cellulose. Native cellulose (and most other polysaccharide fibres) consists of crystalline and amorphous domains, and it is possible to extract the crystalline domains through acid hydrolysis. In water suspensions these anisotropic nanocrystals spontaneously self-assemble to produce photonic films that reflect left-handed circular polarise light, mimicking the structural organisation seen in plywood or Pollia condensata fruit. Our group has been investigating the aspects of these colloidal particles, their self-assembly behaviour and the optical properties of the photonic films produced and modulate their optical response to develop[ colorimetric sensors 1-4. In this talk, I will give an overview of these studies. I will also introduce the optical characterisation set-ups we devised in the PSI to study the colloidal and optical properties of these fibrillar structures.
1. Dumanli, A.G., et al., Digital Color in Cellulose Nanocrystal Films. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2014. 6(15): p. 12302-12306.
2. Espinha, A., et al., Shape Memory Cellulose-Based Photonic Reflectors. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2016. 8(46): p. 31935-31940.
3. Bay, M., et al., Assembly of gold on helicoidal photonic membranes for visible range circular polarizers, in in submission to Advanced Materials. 2023.
4. Balcerowski T, et al., Two-degree hierarchical design via 3-d printing of cholesteric phases of cellulose. In print Small, 2023.
Speaker
Dr. Ahu Gumrah-Parry
Organisation: University of Manchester
Biography: Dr Dumanli-Parry’s research group focuses on understanding of the self-assembly process in nature and mimicking it to produce structurally ordered materials. Dr Dumanli-Parry investigates the complex relationship between the intrinsic properties of colloidal building blocks and the physical effects that modulate the self-assembly process to build active matter for sensing technologies and shape morphing systems as well as light harvesting applications.
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