We discuss recent results from our research group on designing soft and stiff synthetic and natural components for bionanocomposite materials and lightweight robust structures for sensing and photonic nanomaterials as summarized in our recent reviews and publications.  Silk fibroin proteins and cellulose nanocrystals/nanofibers as natural components and graphene oxide sheets as synthetic components are combined for prospective functional nanocomposites.  These thin films with controllable structural colors and chirality open up interesting possibilities for broad applications as flexible biophotonics.  In the first approach, we fabricated uniformly aligned chiral photonic films from a liquid crystal phase formed by a cellulose nanocrystal dispersion placed in a thin capillary.  This confinement facilitates a slow homogeneous growth of chiral pseudo-layers parallel to the interface in contrast to the highly heterogeneous process of CNC drying in the drop-cast films.  The preferential evaporation of water along the air/water interface induces a saturated vapor promoting unidirectional propagation of the ordered phase in large regions that results in chiral CNC solid films with uniformly oriented layer morphology.  The resulting films show a narrow optical reflectance band and uniform birefringence over large regions.  In another related study, we observed that combining of biological components such as silks and cellulose nanofibers can result in formation of peculiar 1D shish-kebab nanostructures and robust 2D nanostructures can be assembled from graphene oxide sheets wrapped into cellulose nanofiber networks.<br/>

Organized assembly of biopolymer components at interfaces

2019 Spring National Meeting

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