Poly(aryl amino ketone)-based materials with excellent electrochromic and electrofluorochromic behaviors

In recent years, electrochromic materials have attracted much attention for application in many fields, such as smart windows, mirrors, optical displays, and camouflage materials. Due to the advantages of short switching time, easy color-tuning, and high optical contrast ratio, polymer materials have great value for this research. In this work, a series of nonconjugated poly(aryl amino ketone) (PAAK)-based materials with carbazol-9-yl triphenylamine (CzTPA) units were designed and synthesized. These polymers were first used to research electrochromism (EC) and electrofluorochromism (EFC). In spite of the fact that they are nonconjugated polymers, they still exhibited some exciting electrochromic and electrofluorochromic performances, such as good switching time (the fastest speed can reach 1.91 s for coloring and 0.66 s for bleaching), high optical contrast (PAAK-tBu-CzTPA's highest Δ%T is 87% at 730 nm) and rapid fluorescence response (1.42 s for quenching).