Self-Assembly of Ternary Particles for Tough Colloidal Crystals with Vivid Structure Colors

Binfu Bao,Duo Liu,Bo You,Zhehong Shen,Youyou Yang

doi:10.1155/2013/407372

Abstract

Self-assembly of colloidal spheres is the most frequently used method for structural colors, but the chroma of the structural colors is usually so low that people cannot observe it under natural conditions. This paper presents a facile method for fabrications of vivid structural colors by doping carbon black into the self-assembly of colloidal polymer spheres and nanosilica particles. This approach can generate very gorgeous structural colors which can be very easily seen under natural conditions. The fabrication conditions for the self-assembly of composite dispersions of polymer/silica/carbon black were optimized to obtain colloidal crystals with vivid colors. Thus, robust mechanical properties, large-scale, and brilliant structural colors can guarantee the obtained crystal films to find practical applications, which are demonstrated by the fact that the successful applications of structural colors beautify the original simple and tedious surface of bamboo strand board (BSB).

Highlights

Photonic crystal has been the focus in material science and technology because of its manipulations of photon propagation and promising applications in communication, sensor and detector, coating, and displays [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
Only an experienced man could detect its color at a certain angle to light source [26], which limits its applications in coatings, cosmetics, decorations, textiles, and sensors [27, 28]
According to Bragg diffraction law (1), peak positions have relationships with the effective index n and the distance d between [111] crystal planes calculated by d = √2/3D, where D is the diameter of the polymer spheres

Summary

Introduction

Photonic crystal has been the focus in material science and technology because of its manipulations of photon propagation and promising applications in communication, sensor and detector, coating, and displays [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The fabrication of robust colloidal crystals for structural color by self-assembly of soft polymer/silica particles is novel and facile works. In order to obtain the optimal growth conditions for high crystalline quality, in this paper, the effect of carbon black properties, evaporation temperature, relative humidity (RH), and silica content on polymer films are researched systematically by controlled self-assembly process to study the action mechanism. It is not studied by other groups, which provides a good basis for commercialization

Experimental Section

Results and Discussion

Conclusion