The University of Bath is to head an international consortium aiming to prepare OLEDs for lighting and other consumer applications.
“This is an EU-funded project with five academic groups and two industrial groups,” project co-ordinator Dr Alison Walker of Bath told EW. “Two un-funded US groups are also collaborating in the project.”
The aim is to understand fundamental OLED science so that materials can be designed from the bottom up. “They are not very well understood,” said Walker.
“We have been modelling them for 10 years or so and we are only just finding ways to model the disorder that has a strong effect of display lifetime. We have now developed the method, but haven’t started using it yet,” said Walker.
According to Walker, lifetime depends fundamentally on the way carriers move around the materials - which in this case are conjugated polymers. The universities of Bath and Monns in Belgium will be modelling the movement of exitons in the materials using Monte Carlo simulation in research which is also likely also to benefit organic solar cell research, said Walker, adding: “A lot of the science will equally apply to plastic transistors and polymer sensors.”
The £850,000 project, dubbed Modecom, will last until October 2009.
As well as the molecular level, the consortium will also look at the workings of devices as a whole.
Modecom
Bath university animation explaining the uses of OLEDs