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

Bora   Yoon  ,     Dae-Young   Ham  ,     Oktay   Yarimaga  ,     Hyosung   An  ,     Chan Woo   Lee  ,
    a n d  Jong-Man   Kim   *

Advanced Materials

Volume 23, Issue 46, pages 5492–5497, December 8, 2011

 
Inkjet-printable aqueous suspensions of conjugated polymer precursorsare 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.