OLEDWORKS LLC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 14b

Description

The OLED lighting market requires significant acceleration to realize its promise of expanding SSL adoption, saving energy and creating US manufacturing jobs- The major barriers slowing the adoption of OLED lighting today are the relatively high cost and lower performance relative to LED lighting- Costs will come down by economies-of-scale as volumes grow, and OLED materials are becoming less expensive as OLED display volumes grow- However, innovations are needed to reduce the cost of substrates and to enable lower cost roll-to-roll (R2R) processing methods, while at the same time improving the energy efficiency of OLED lighting- In this project, OLEDWorks will develop a high efficacy and cost-effective flexible OLED lighting system which will reduce the cost of OLED light by introducing a combination of printable and scalable internal light extraction and transparent conductive silver nanowire technologies that are compatible with R2R methods, and demonstrate these technical advances on bendable glass and flexible plastic substrates- Higher power efficacy will be achieved by co-optimization of the internal extraction, silver nanowire anode, and stacked white OLED to reduce unwanted absorption, increase the outcoupling efficiency, and lower the OLED voltage- Through co-optimization of these component systems, world-class power efficacy of 100 lm/W or greater can be demonstrated in a flexible OLED lighting panel-