Four Shades of Brown: Tuning of Electrochromic Polymer Blends Towards High-Contrast Eyewear
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Authors
Anna Osterholm
D. Eric Shen
Justin A Kerszulis
Rayford H Bulloch
Michael Kuepfert
Aubrey L Dyer
John R Reynolds
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Type
Journal Article, Professional Journal
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Abstract
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.