Future Coating Designs for Enhanced Optics • Taking Lessons from Nature, 2011 PaperCon Conference

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Whiteness is a concept that carries considerable emotive power. Successful marketing campaigns have managed to convince us that brilliant whiteness is associated with increased purity, quality, freshness and cleanliness – making whiteness synonymous with enhanced brand value. As a result, whiteness is a desirable attribute in many common-place commercial products, such as: paper, plastics, rubber, ceramics and cosmetics. In these synthetic products, the inclusions of microscopic natural and synthetic mineral particles are used to provide the whiteness. The size and shape of these mineral particles are carefully controlled to ensure that they form packed structures that scatter light in a multi-wavelength manner, and with intensity that makes a firm visual impression. Through careful control of the size and PSD (particle size distribution), a great diversity of coating structures may be created in the complex mineral-void layer.

Traditional engineering has enabled this field to develop to a very high degree with increasingly complex beneficiation routes providing the ability to neutralise the shade of the mineral constituents, while the use of complex grinding and other mechanical routes have enabled mineral particle size and shape to be tailored with a high degree of control. However, a new approach is required to take this field further. Biomimetics provides one such approach. It is an enabling discipline that looks towards Nature for design inspiration, accepting that millions of years of design evolution may have provided novel and unique solutions to modern industrial problems.