Although materials with structural colours are known to be resistant to photobleaching, the damage caused by structural failure and lack of suitable fabrication methods limit their practical uses. Herein, confinement-mediated self-assembly of colloidal crystals in dynamic borate ester-based networks is demonstrated to produce spherical opal composites using a microfluidic device. The resulting optical beads are flowable and injectable, facilitating injection moulding of three-dimensionally well-defined macroscopic opals. Further, the opal composites formed in semi-spherical sessile microdroplets can serve as individual pixels for two-dimensional patterns integrating angle-independent structural colours and self-healing characteristics. These findings provide novel insights for the development of multi-scale opal constructs with ability to resist the physical damage and to increase the lifetime.

尽管已知具有结构色的材料可以抵抗光漂白，但由于结构故障和缺乏合适的制造方法造成的损坏限制了它们的实际用途。在此，基于动态硼酸酯的网络中胶体晶体的限制介导自组装被证明可以使用微流体装置生产球形蛋白石复合材料。由此产生的光学珠是可流动和可注射的，有助于三维明确的宏观蛋白石的注射成型。此外，在半球形无柄微滴中形成的蛋白石复合材料可以作为集成了与角度无关的结构颜色和自愈特性的二维图案的单个像素。