Microfluidic Printing of High Performance Microgrids for High Efficiency, Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diodes

Currently, indium tin oxide (ITO) is used as the transparent conductive anode in all commercial organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). However, ITO has economic and technological limitations for OLEDs such as high cost, brittleness, and poor performance. The primary objective of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I proposal is to demonstrate the microfluidic printing of substrate embedded metal microgrids with transmission over 90% in the visible range and sheet resistance less than 1 Ω/square over a 10 x 10 cm area with all processing at low temperatures ( 10 µm) can all be printed at low temperatures with high throughput embedded into substrates that allow for subsequent organic layer deposition. The PIs will collaborate with OLEDWorks in Phase II on integrating, testing, and characterizing the microgrids with state-of-the-art OLEDs.