Novel Structural Color Materials from Self-Assembly of Biosourced Brush-like Copolymers – SugarColors

Colored structural materials found in nature are of great interest and their fascinating properties have stimulated the design of bioinspired functional photonic materials. Due to their intrinsic ability to modify the propagation of visible light, they are potential candidates for various optoelectronic applications, including as filters, low and high reflection coatings, or resonant gratings and cavities.
Nowadays, scientists have reached a level of understanding that allows the development of various types of colored structural materials using bottom-up self-assembly approaches. These materials are composed of elementary building blocks such as organic-inorganic nanoparticles, or synthetic high molecular weight linear block copolymers (BCPs). Very recently, another class of nanostructured systems has emerged, based on the self-assembly of brush-like block copolymers (BBCPs). These copolymers present attractive properties due to their high density of functional groups, their low entanglement and their ability to self-assemble rapidly into highly ordered nanostructures. It is thus possible to form lamellar organizations with inter-domain spaces of a few hundred nanometers, generating structural colors. However, at present, all available systems are made from petroleum-based polymers.
The SUGARCOLORS project proposes to use fully biobased BBCPs, elaborated from sugars and polyesters, sustainable constituents that are attracting increasing interest due to their "green" characteristics: biocompatibility, biodegradability and biorecognition properties. Various industrial sectors are particularly interested and applications at the macroscopic level offer solutions to create new biomaterials based on modified sugars with several available hydroxyl groups. These materials have promising characteristics that should allow advanced electronic devices and their applications in various sectors such as food, packaging, cosmetics, health and microelectronics to become more environmentally friendly and biocompatible. To better understand these systems and incorporate them into new devices (bio-nanoelectronics) in response to the transition to a bio-based economy, it is important to control the mechanisms of self-assembly at the nanoscale.
Based on a multidisciplinary consortium with complementary expertise (CERMAV and LTM), the SUGARCOLORS project proposes an innovative strategy for the elaboration of carbohydrate-based brush-like block copolymer systems. It aims at designing colored structural materials and to study them systematically according to the state of the art in order to design photonic crystals based on colored biomaterials that are reflective and responsive to external stimuli. Such a project constitutes a "green technology platform" to design new biosourced materials, and creating a significant opportunity for the valorization of these new bio-nanomaterials especially for optoelectronic applications.