Microcapsule-based materials for electrophoretic displays

Abstract

Electrophoretic displays, the rewritable non-light-emitting display technology based on the movement of colored pigments inside a low dielectric liquid as a voltage is applied, have attracted a great deal of academic and commercial interests due to the combination of the advantages of both electronic displays and conventional paper, including paper-like high contrast appearance, ultra-low power consumption, thinness, flexibility etc. Fabrication of electrophoretic ink by microencapsulating the electrophoretic suspension into individual microcapsules is one way to realize such application. However, there are still some limitations for its commercial application, such as the dispersion and the electrophoretic mobility of charged particles due to the nano-particles aggregation, the barrier property and stability of microcapsule wall due to the suspension releasing, etc. In this presentation, systematic studies on the preparation of electrophoretic particles and microencapsulation by complex coacervation method were carried out to solve the mentioned problems. The obtained microcapsules can be quasi-monolayer coated on ITO/PET substrate and driven by static mode to obtain a matrix character display prototype.