Commercialization of an Ultra-Thin, Bendable, High Efficacy OLED Light Engine

OLED lighting panels have been available commercially for several years, with relatively slow adoption into commercial and consumer fixtures in the US. This project addresses both channels through the commercialization of an ultra-thin, bendable, high-efficacy OLED light engine in which a panel and driver are engineered together in one low-cost, easy-to-use package. The most significant benefit of OLED lighting to the US could be economic. Today there are only two significant OLED lighting panel manufacturers in the world, OLEDWorks LLC (OLEDWorks) and LG Display. OLEDWorks manufactures the highest brightness, longest lifetime, most efficient, highest quality OLED lighting panels in the world. Its current commercially available rigid OLED light engines (Keuka module) were designed and developed and are assembled at its headquarters in Rochester, New York. Many of the world leading OLED lighting luminaire manufacturers are also located in the US and work closely with OLEDWorks. From this position of strength, the US has the opportunity to maintain a technological advantage that can grow both US manufacturing jobs and export sales. The Phase I project developed a high efficacy, bendable OLED lighting panel, and based on this panel we designed, engineered, and prototyped a thin, curved, high efficacy OLED light engine that demonstrated the proof of concept. The high efficacy, bendable OLED panel developed for use in the light engine included formulation changes to the OLED organic layers and introduction of a highly reflective silver cathode as well as development of new technologies for encapsulation of the panel and for making electrical contact between conductive areas on the panel substrate and the driver PCB. This Phase II will continue the improvements made in Phase I including OLED formulation, and bendable substrates. The efficacy of the OLED panel will be increased from 60 lm/W to 90 lm/W through addition of internal light extraction. We will also address manufacturability and scalability of light engine parts. If all of the improvements in this Phase II proposal can be accomplished, the size of the lighting market that will be available to OLED lighting luminaire manufacturers will drastically increase beyond the high-end niche market of today into the main stream commercial and consumer markets, there-by achieving the promise predicted by the DOE for a mixture of LED and OLED solid state lighting that will significantly reduce energy consumption for lighting while simultaneously improving the social and public benefits of solid state lighting and the economic opportunities for US lighting manufacturers.