An Electrochromic Painter’s Palette: Color Mixing via Solution Co-Processing

Abstract

Electrochromic polymers (ECPs) have been shown to be synthetically tunable, producing a full palette of vibrantly colored to highly transmissive polymers. The development of these colored-to-transmissive ECPs employed synthetic design strategies for broad color targeting; however, due to the subtleties of color perception and the intricacies of polymer structure and color relationships, fine color control is difficult. In contrast, color mixing is a well-established practice in the printing industry. We have identified three colored-to-transmissive switching electrochromic polymers, referred to as ECP-Cyan (ECP-C), ECP-Magenta (ECP-M), and ECP-Yellow (ECP-Y), which, via the co-processing of multicomponent ECP mixtures, follow the CMY color mixing model. The presented work qualitatively assesses the thin film characteristics of solution co-processed ECP mixtures. To quantitatively determine the predictability of the color properties of ECP mixtures, we estimated mass extinction coefficients (ε_mass) from solution spectra of the CMY ECPs and compared the estimated and experimentally observed color values of blends via a calculated color difference (Δ<i>E</i>_ab). The values of Δ<i>E</i>_ab range from 8 to 26 across all mixture compositions, with an average value of 15, representing a reasonable degree of agreement between predicted and observed color values. We demonstrate here the ability to co-process ECP mixtures into vibrantly colored, visually continuous films and the ability to estimate the color properties produced in these mixed ECP films