Molding Inkjetted Silver on Nanostructured Surfaces for High-Throughput Structural Color Printing

Abstract

Inkjet printing of silver ink has been widely used to print conductive patterns in flexible electronic devices, and the printed patterns are commonly known to be colorless. We demonstrate that by printing a single type of ordinary silver nanoparticle ink on top of a substrate patterned with polymer nanostructures, the printed silver is molded by the nanostructures and gains robust structural colors. The colors are tunable by varying the geometries of nanostructures, and a broad range of visual colors can be achieved by mixing the red, green, and blue colors displayed from silver dots printed on different nanostructures. Such mechanism can enable full-color, scalable, high-throughput, versatile, and cost-effective printing of structural color images for regular publishing and displaying purposes. In experiments, we implemented a transparent polymer substrate patterned with diffractive nanostructure arrays to print full-color images. The printed images display color-shifting optically variable effects useful for security and authentication applications that demand customizable anticounterfeiting features.

Inkjet printed nanomaterial based flexible radio frequency identification (RFID) tag sensors for the internet of nano things

“…Different types of photonic crystals have been used for inkjet printing to create structural color patterns for applications in security and anticounterfeiting. [109][110][111][112][113] The inkjet printing of silver NP ink on exible substrates has shown great potential for printing conductive patterns for wearable electronic devices. Jiang et al 113 reported printing of silver nanoparticle (AgNP) ink on top of the patterned polymer nanostructures where the polymer nanostructures molded the printed silver and yielding into structural colors.…”

Nonvolatile, Multicolored Photothermal Writing of Block Copolymer Structural Color

“…Owing to their photonic bandgaps, they exhibit structural colors (SCs) in the visible wavelength region . PCs have potential applications in low‐power reflective‐mode displays, media boards, and sensors because of their versatile tunability of SCs through the dielectric contrast, dimensions, and shapes of the structural elements. PCs have also been demonstrated as nonvolatile, high‐density information recording media for various emerging smart technologies .…”

Designing Multicolor Micropatterns of Inverse Opals with Photonic Bandgap and Surface Plasmon Resonance

“…Although colloidal lithography has been employed to produce SPR‐active nanostructures in a wide area, multicolor micropatterning requires complex and delicate deposition and etching processes . Recently, relatively simple and reproducible methods on multicolor pattering of SPR‐active nanostructures have been suggested . However, the color patterns are insensitive to the environmental condition as metal nanostructures are fully covered by a polymeric matrix, restricting their applications.…”