This article reports a scalable technology for fabricating polymer films with excellent water-repelling and anti-ultraviolet properties. A roll-to-roll compatible doctor blade coating technology is utilized to prepare silica colloidal crystal-polymer composites. The silica microspheres can then be selectively removed to create flexible self-standing macroporous polymer films with crystalline arrays of pores. The void sizes are controlled by tuning the duration of a reactive ion etching process prior to the removal of the templating silica microspheres. After surface modification, superhydrophobic surface can be achieved. This study further demonstrates that the as-prepared transparent porous films with 200 nm of pores exhibit diffraction of ultraviolet lights originated from the Bragg's diffractive of light from the three-dimensional highly ordered air cavities.
In this article, we report a roll-to-roll compatible bottom-up self-assembly approach to fabricate double-multilayer macroporous polymer photonic crystals consisting of a multilayer of three-dimensional (3D) hexagonal close-packed (HCP) 200 nm spherical pores and a multilayer of 3D HCP 500 nm spherical pores. Both optical measurements and theoretical predictions reveal that the as-prepared polymer film exhibits anti-ultraviolet and anti-near-infrared properties caused by the Bragg's diffractive of incident ultraviolet radiation and near-infrared radiation from the crystalline lattice of air cavities in the polymer film.
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