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Published on: June 28, 2017
Silk Fluorescence Collimator for Ultrasensitive Humidity Sensing and Light-Harvesting in Semitransparent
Fan Hu1,2, Wenzhe Liu3, Weifeng Li1
1Research Institute for Biomimetics and Soft Matter, College of Materials, College of Physical Science and Technology, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory for Soft Functional Materials Research, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, China.
Abstract:
This work examines the self-collimation effect of silk materials on fluorescence emission/detection. A macroscopic regulation strategy, coupled with meso-reconstruction and meso-functionalization, is adopted to amplify the fluorescence emission of organic fluorescent dyes (i.e., Rhodamine 6G (R6G)) using silk photonic crystal (PC) films. The fluorescence emission can be linearly enhanced or inhibited by a PC as a result of the photonic bandgap coupling with the excitation light and/or emission light. Depending on the design of the silk fluorescence collimator, the emission can reach 49.37 times higher than the control. The silk fluorescence collimator can be applied to achieve significant benefits: for instance, as a humidity sensor, it provides good reproducibility and a sensitivity of 28.50 a.u./% relative humidity, which is 80.78 times higher than the sensitivity of the control, and as a novel curtain, it raises the energy conversion efficiency of the semitransparent dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) by 16%.
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