Solar Aluminum Kitchen Foils with Omnidirectional Vivid Polarizonic Colors

To meet the need to the “customized eco-friendly” design of flexible solar materials in vivid colors, here, the solar kitchen foils are devised which are selective, omnidirectional, and colored. The experimental and simulation results enable drawing the roadmap of the fabrication of glowing, colored flat foils for diverse energy, packaging, and decoration purposes. A new gold-free golden foil, i.e., mimicking gold optically and visually, is designed as a prototype for the sustainable fabrication of advanced colored foils with glowing colors, e.g., golden with no need to neither hazardous anodization nor dying processes. The solar foil performs based on the newly developed concept of the polarizonic interference allowing production of omnidirectional structural colors by a disordered plasmonic nanocomposite. As the specific highlight, selective reflective coloration by plasmonic dipoles in a hybrid dielectric host, i.e., the building block of ultrathin solar absorbers with tailored, vivid colors, on an aluminum foil is demonstrated. In terms of the production technique, the applied sputtering technique is simple, versatile, cost-effective, and compatible with the industrial packaging, decoration, and solar absorber manufacturing processes. Thus, it holds great promise for creation of advanced, flexible, colored solar absorbers in a simple, scalable, and sustainable fashion.