Structural colored fabrics with hydrophobic and angle-dependent property prepared by one step dip-coating

Abstract

Photonic crystal structural colored fabrics have received significant interest in fabric coloring for their high brightness, high color saturation, anti-photo blenching, and iridescent properties. Further endowing structural colored fabrics with hydrophobic property can effectively boosts their practicality and meet the requirements of color stability in fabrics. However, introducing low surface energy substances directly into the interparticle voids will diminish the color saturation, while directly using hydrophobic particles for assembly might alter the surface charges and impede orderly assembly. These two issues constrain the practical utilization of structural colored materials. Herein, a simple yet efficient approach to create structural colored fabrics with angle-dependent color and hydrophobicity by using carefully modified hydrophobic SiO₂ colloid particles (h-SiO₂ CPs) as buiding blocks is introduced in this paper. In order to achieve SiO₂ CPs with both hydrophobicity and assemblability, the hydrophilic SiO₂ CPs were controllably modified with silane. The corresponding hydrophobic colored fabric was obtained by directly immersing the pure fabric in ethanol dispersion of h-SiO₂ CPs with desired mass fractions, then dried at ambient temperature. Compared with the structural colored fabric assembled with traditional hydrophilic SiO₂ CPs, fabrics prepared by this method exhibit not only bright iridescent structural color but also hydrophobicity. Additionally, by simply adjusting the particle size of h-SiO₂ CPs, hydrophobic fabrics with various colors can be prepared. This work offers a cost-effective and practical preparation method for preparing hydrophobic structural colored fabrics with vivid structural colors.