title: Four shades of brown: tuning of electrochromic polymer blends toward high-contrast eyewear.
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.
authors.affiliation: School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics, Georgia Institute of Technology , Atlanta, Georgia 30332, United States.
authors.forename: Anna M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Österholm
authors.forename: D Eric
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.forename: Justin A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Kerszulis
authors.forename: Rayford H
authors.initials: RH
authors.lastname: Bulloch
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kuepfert
authors.forename: Aubrey L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Dyer
authors.forename: John R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Reynolds
mesh_terms: D003116:Color; D004563:Electrochemistry; D007909:Lenses; D010084:Oxidation-Reduction / Q000528:radiation effects; D011108:Polymers / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000528:radiation effects
chemical_list: D011108:Polymers
keywords: color mixing; dioxythiophenes; electrochromic devices; electrochromic eyewear; electrochromic polymers; organic electronics