Investigating the Effect of Reflectance Tuning on Photocatalytic Dye Degradation with Biotemplated ZnO Photonic Nanoarchitectures Based on Morpho Butterfly Wings

Photonic nanoarchitectures of butterfly wings can serve as biotemplates to prepare semiconductor thin films of ZnO by atomic layer deposition. The resulting biotemplated ZnO nanoarchitecture preserves the structural and optical properties of the natural system, while it will also have the features of the functional material. The ZnO-coated wings can be used directly in heterogeneous photocatalysis to decompose pollutants dissolved in water upon visible light illumination. We used the photonic nanoarchitectures of different Morpho butterflies with different structural colors as biotemplates and examined the dependence of decomposition rates of methyl orange and rhodamine B dyes on the structural color of the biotemplates and the thickness of the ZnO coating. Using methyl orange, we measured a ten-fold increase in photodegradation rate when the 20 nm ZnO-coated wings were compared to similarly coated glass substrates. Using rhodamine B, a saturating relationship was found between the degradation rate and the thickness of the deposited ZnO on butterfly wings. We concluded that the enhancement of the catalytic efficiency can be attributed to the slow light effect due to a spectral overlap between the ZnO-coated Morpho butterfly wings reflectance with the absorption band of dyes, thus the photocatalytic performance could be changed by the tuning of the structural color of the butterfly biotemplates. The photodegradation mechanism of the dyes was investigated by liquid chromatography–mass spectroscopy.