SBIR Phase II: Structural Color for Sustainable Printing

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to commercialize a novel and sustainable approach to color in inks, paints and other colored coatings. The project develops a materials platform for structural color, a method of color generation that can be an environmentally safer alternative to current coloration techniques (such as organic dyes, inorganic pigments, and effect pigments) and also can eliminate many common formulation challenges. The technology developed here is a drop-in polymer binder that can replace or co-exist with commercial ink binders, providing coloration without pigments or dyes. The materials are designed from the same building blocks that constitute widely utilized polymers commonly found in food packaging. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project addresses key risks and technical challenges associated with commercializing brush block copolymer based photonic crystals. This advanced materials platform is ideal for large-area reflective materials due to the low cost of the raw materials and the simplicity of "bottom-up" fabrication by macromolecular self-assembly. To achieve real-world commercial use, both the chemistries used in production of the polymeric building blocks and the inkjet printing deposition methods of the resulting structural color inks will be further developed. The activities in this Phase II project will develop viable chemistries for commercial scaling, establish a large-scale deposition method with industrial inkjet processes, implement cross-linking strategies compatible on the time-scale of self-assembly, and characterize and improve upon the color gamut of the first tunable printable structural color ink system. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.