  Multifunctional coatings are central for information, biomedical,
transportation and energy technologies. These coatings must possess
hard-to-attain properties and be scalable, adaptable, and sustainable, which
makes layer-by-layer assembly (LBL) of nanomaterials uniquely suitable for
these technologies. What remains largely unexplored is that LBL enables
computational methodologies for structural design of these composites.
Utilizing silver nanowires (NWs), we develop and validate a graph theoretical
(GT) description of their LBL composites. GT successfully describes the
multilayer structure with nonrandom disorder and enables simultaneous rapid
assessment of several properties of electrical conductivity, electromagnetic
transparency, and anisotropy. GT models for property assessment can be rapidly
validated due to (1) quasi-2D confinement of NWs and (2) accurate microscopy
data for stochastic organization of the NW networks. We finally show that
spray-assisted LBL offers direct translation of the GT-based design of
composite coatings to additive, scalable manufacturing of drone wings with
straightforward extensions to other technologies.
