Inkjet Printing of Conjugated Polymer Precursors on Paper Substrates for Colorimetric Sensing and Flexible Electrothermochromic Display

Abstract

Inkjet���printable aqueous suspensions of conjugated polymer precursors are developed for fabrication of patterned color images on paper substrates. Printing of a diacetylene (DA)���surfactant composite ink on unmodified paper and photopaper, as well as on a banknote, enables generation of latent images that are transformed to blue���colored polydiacetylene (PDA) structures by UV irradiation. Both irreversible and reversible thermochromism with the PDA printed images are demonstrated and applied to flexible and disposable sensors and to displays