Researchers develop hair-thin fiber OLED capable of emitting white light

By Park Sae-jin Posted : April 21, 2022, 09:29 Updated : April 21, 2022, 09:29

[Courtesy of KAIST]


SEOUL -- South Korean researchers have developed a fiber organic light-emitting diode that is capable of emitting white light. The fiber that is thinner than a strand of hair can be used in various sectors including fashion, medical, safety, and flexible display.
 
Normally, white organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), also known as WOLEDs, emit white light through color filters of red, green, and blue (RGB) in a similar way to that of liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Direct emission RGB-type OLEDs mainly used in portable devices emit lights of red, green, and blue directly. RGB OLEDs emit white light by controlling the strength of colored lights.
 
WOLEDs are based on a tandem structure which is a sandwich of electroluminescent units that are stacked atop of each other and separated by charge generation layers (CGLs). Such a structure is about two or three times thicker than RGB OLEDs, making the white light-emitting diode not ideal to be created on fabrics or other flexible materials.
 
The Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) said that its research team focused on the development of a single white light-emitting layer that can be deep-coated to be applied to fabrics and successfully created a fabric WOLED for the first time. The WOLED was found to have high optoelectric performance with high stability.
 
"We hope to actualize high-quality electric fabric displays by developing core technologies that are new to the electric textile display sector," KAIST researcher Hwang Yong-ha said in a statement on April 20. 
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