Mechanical nondiscoloring and antistretching photonic crystal films based on Zn2+ coordination and hydroxypropyl methylcellulose

Mechanical nondiscoloring and antistretching photonic crystal (PC) films, especially those with stable structure colors during deformation, have great potential applications in wearable display devices, decoration, and packaging. Here, PC films with antistretching and invariant structural colors during deformation were prepared, by combining Zn²⁺ coordinated elastic material and hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) with polystyrene@silica (PS@SiO₂) colloidal crystals. The PC films release energy by forming local fractures at a microscopic level during the straining process but the lattice spacing and effective refractive index of the local array do not change. According to the Bragg law, the structure color remains unchanged. The introduction of HPMC gave the PC films excellent tensile properties, and the maximum tensile strength reached 10 MPa. And after 100 times of stretching, bending and compression cycles, the structural color remained unchanged.