Simple and efficient fabrication of multi-stage color-changeable photonic prints as anti-counterfeit labels

Dongpeng Yang; Cheng Ouyang; Yuqi Zhang; Dekun Ma; Yuemei Ye; Donglei Bu; Shaoming Huang

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2021.01.041

Simple and efficient fabrication of multi-stage color-changeable photonic prints as anti-counterfeit labels

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2021 May 15:590:134-143. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2021.01.041. Epub 2021 Jan 21.

Authors

Dongpeng Yang¹, Cheng Ouyang², Yuqi Zhang³, Dekun Ma⁴, Yuemei Ye⁵, Donglei Bu², Shaoming Huang⁶

Affiliations

¹ School of Materials and Energy, Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Materials and Energy Storage Devices, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, PR China. Electronic address: dpyang@gdut.edu.cn.
² School of Materials and Energy, Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Materials and Energy Storage Devices, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, PR China.
³ Institute of Textiles and Clothing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
⁴ Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Alternative Technologies for Fine Chemicals Process, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing 312000, PR China.
⁵ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
⁶ School of Materials and Energy, Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Materials and Energy Storage Devices, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, PR China. Electronic address: smhuang@gdut.edu.cn.

PMID: 33524714
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2021.01.041

Abstract

Color changeable photonic prints (CCPPs) show their potential applications in high-level information storage and anti-counterfeiting, but usually suffer from the complex fabrication process and limited color variation. Here, a simple and efficient method is developed to generate CCPPs with multilevel tunable color contrasts by packing the solvent responsive photonic crystals with diverse cross-linking degrees and desired way. The key to the successful fabrication is to create and control over the optical response of each part of the CCPPs through altering the cross-linking degree of PCs and thus the affinity between the CCPPs and solvents. A CCPPs based anti-fake label with the encrypted information functionality which originates from reversible color change between dried state and swelling with the mixture of acetic acid and ethanol is investigated. Compared with conventional CCPPs, the as-prepared CCPPs can reveal multistage information depending on the volume fraction of ethanol. This work provides a new insight for the simple fabrication of CCPPs and will facilitate their applications in the information protection and high-level anti-counterfeiting.

Keywords: Anti-counterfeiting; Color-changeable; Multi-stage; Photonic crystals; Photonic prints.