Roller‐Assisted Adhesion Imprinting for High‐Throughput Manufacturing of Wearable and Stretchable Organic Light‐Emitting Devices

Abstract

Stretchable organic optoelectronic devices have been developed rapidly in the last few years due to their great potential in wearable electronics. Although high performance is obtained, high‐throughput manufacturing of these devices is still a challenge for their commercial application. Here, a roller‐assisted adhesion imprinting (RAI) technique is developed to overcome this challenge by rapid production of ordered and large‐area wrinkled structures on organic optoelectronic devices to enable their stretchability. Different from the conventional imprinting technology requiring heating or ultraviolet treatment, adhesion force is employed innovatively in the RAI process to form microstructures within the imprinted materials. As a demonstration, a stretchable wrinkled structure with its length of more than 10 cm is rapidly fabricated and larger area is available by continuous imprinting. Stretchable organic light‐emitting devices (SOLEDs) are easily manufactured by the RAI process. The SOLEDs can be elongated to 100% strain and keep working with 5% current efficiency variation after 35 000 cycles of stretching with 20% tensile strain. This is the best mechanical stability of SOLEDs reported to date. The development of the high‐throughput, large‐area, and cost‐effective RAI technique provides potential roll‐to‐roll continuous production of stretchable electronics.

Hierarchically Structured Stretchable Conductive Hydrogels for High-Performance Wearable Strain Sensors and Supercapacitors

“…Newly developed flexible and stretchable electronics seek to bridge the gap between human and machine by either performing human functions, such as in artificial skins 1 and multifunctional prosthetics for assisting human movements, 2 or interfacing with clothing or the human body, such as in conductive interconnects, 3 bioelectronics, 4 wearable sensors, 5 stretchable energy-storage devices, 6,7 and flexible optoelectronic devices. 8 All of these applications require materials that are highly electrically conductive and mechanically compliant. One strategy to enable these functions is structurally designing the nonstretchable materials to absorb strain without fracture.…”

Structures and Materials in Stretchable Electroluminescent Devices

“…They obtained a buckled OLED that could be stretched up to 100% strain (Figure 4j). In an alternative approach by the same group, [50] the surface grooves were formed by stretch fragmented silver coating on a VHB film (Figure 4k). To enhance the adhesion of laminated OLED film on the surface area without silver fragments, a roller with patterned protrusions was employed to press the thin film during the transfer.…”

Emerging Biomedical Applications of Organic Light‐Emitting Diodes

“…[40,[48][49][50][51][52] Additionally, stretchable OLEDs have gained a lot of attention and are extremely promising for wearable devices, which usually experience both bending and tensile strain. [48,[52][53][54][55][56][57][58] Despite the great promise in achieving highly flexible lightemitting devices, the use of OLEDs in medicine typically requires device lifetimes ranging from few hours in case of plaster-type wearables up to years when used as implants. In addition, for many applications the devices have to withstand harsh environmental conditions, in particular high humidity and/or immersion into water.…”