Polymer-based electrochromic materials have potential application prospects in the field of displays, but the lack of a highly transparent state to red/green/blue color state limits their development and commercial applications. Herein, it is proposed to design and synthesize photo-crosslinkable polymers based on different donor or acceptor groups modified phenothiazine or triphenylamine as electrochromic units and cinnamate as photo-crosslinking units. The influences of different donor or acceptor groups, such as phenyl and methoxy, on the electrochemical and spectroelectrochemical behavior of the polymers are clarified in order to achieve neutral, highly transparent states and red/green/blue colors in the oxidation states without the intermediate color state. The crosslinkable system inside the polymer changes its intrinsic soluble characteristic into a solvent-resistant property, thus resulting in a stable polymer film via the UV irradiation method. Hence, an all-solid-state electrochromic device was fabricated by separately utilizing three photo-crosslinkable polymer films as an electrochromic layer, which shows obvious reversible electrochromism with the “RGB” patterns, demonstrating it as a candidate for electronic paper and electronic tags.
In this work, we report the aggregation-induced emission in a polymeric donor material poly(bis(2-butyloctyl)[2,2′:5′,2″-terthiophene]-4,4″-dicarboxylate-5,5′-diyl-vinylene) (PTVT-T), which exhibits a high device performance for the application of photovoltaics. Time-dependent density functional theory calculations and steady-state and time-resolved spectroscopy have been employed to reveal the underlying emission mechanism. We find that the aggregation of the PTVT-T polymer chain in solution increases the exciton luminescence lifetime and exciton emission quantum yield, which is related to the effective torsional inhibition of carbon–carbon single bonds. Compared with the aggregates in solution, the exciton emission quantum yield of the aggregates in PTVT-T film is reduced. It is attributable to exciton delocalization caused by the improvement of molecular planarity in film. We also observe that the as-cast film and thermally annealed film show distinctly different emission behaviors. This work can shed light on designing optoelectronic polymer materials with the integration of photovoltaic and light-emitting functions.