Four Shades of Brown: Tuning of Electrochromic Polymer Blends Toward High-Contrast Eyewear

• Published in: ACS applied materials & interfaces 2015-01, Vol.7 (3), p.1413-1421
• Main Authors: Österholm, Anna M, Shen, D. Eric, Kerszulis, Justin A, Bulloch, Rayford H, Kuepfert, Michael, Dyer, Aubrey L, Reynolds, John R
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Color; Electrochemistry; Lenses; Oxidation-Reduction - radiation effects; Polymers - chemistry; Polymers - radiation effects
• ISSN: 1944-8244; 1944-8252
• DOI: 10.1021/am507063d

We report a straightforward strategy of accessing a wide variety of colors through simple predictive color mixing of electrochromic polymers (ECPs). We have created a set of brown ECP blends that can be incorporated as the active material in user-controlled electrochromic eyewear. Color mixing of ECPs proceeds in a subtractive fashion, and we acquire various hues of brown through the mixing of cyan and yellow primaries in combination with orange and periwinkle-blue secondary colors. Upon oxidation, all of the created blends exhibit a change in transmittance from ca. 10 to 70% in a few seconds. We demonstrate the attractiveness of these ECP blends as active materials in electrochromic eyewear by assembling user-controlled, high-contrast, fast-switching, and fully solution-processable electrochromic lenses with colorless transmissive states and colored states that correspond to commercially available sunglasses. The lenses were fabricated using a combination of inkjet printing and blade-coating to illustrate the feasibility of using soluble ECPs for high-throughput and large-scale processing.