Fabrication Of Structure-Colored Polymer/Free-Standing Films By Periodic/Amorphous Photonic Crystals

Lots of scientists started to study the theories, preparation methods and applications of photonic crystal because of its unique optical properties. People found that two kinds of structures could reveal structure color:one is called periodic photonic crystal (PC), which generates iridescent light; the other is amorphous photonic crystal (APC), whose colors are constant. The integrity of this structural material is very important to its optical property. However, the substrate is usually used to fabricate photonic crystals; there is no interrelation between the photonic crystal and the substrate, which limits their applications.Polymer film is widely used in daily life and production, this paper immobilized photonic crystal on polymer film by surface modification to support photonic crystal and add optical property to the polymer film.This paper utilized centrifugation to fabricate highly ordered PC and added external forces to destroy the periodic structure successfully obtaining APC with particles closely arraying. By changing different dispersant and proportion of two kinds of dispersants, we can control the structure colors. Then we synthesized Poly(BPMA-NIPAM), which is photoactive and hydrophilic. By UV irradiating, PC and APC were successfully immobilized on the polymer films.This paper used two kinds of different crosslinking systems to prepare APC into the free-standing films and through a variety of characterization, confirming the structure-colored free-standing films were successfully fabricated. Then, by changing the dosage of the cross-linking agent, we could control particle spacing, getting free-standing films with different colors, and the color would change under different view angles.