Wait A Minute
There have been a number of blogs and tech press spouting the headline, “Breakthrough could help you 3D print OLED screens at home”, “You would be able to 3D print OLED displays at home with this tech”, or “It’s not hard to imagine in just a few short years you could see this approach applied at home or on the road…with small portable printers”, all of which seem to have come from an article published in “Science Advances”, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society and publisher of the “Science” family of journals. The article entitled “3D Printed flexible organic light-emitting diode displays” (Ruitao, Hyun-Park, Ouyang, Ahn, & McAlpine, 2022), whose authors are associated with the University of Minnesota, describes a process for 3D printing all components of a flexible OLED display, hence the extrapolation that one day you will be able to print flexible OLED displays in your home workshop.
The production of flexible OLED displays is a complex process, typically involving spin-coating, sputtering, and plasma based deposition tools. In some cases ink-jet printing is used to lay successive layers of organic and inorganic encapsulation material to keep air and water vapor from destroying OLED materials that are particularly sensitive to these elements. There are a small number of OLED display manufacturers that use ink-jet printing to pattern the OLED materials themselves and the recently described QD/OLED displays from Samsung Display use IJP to pattern quantum dots on OLED materials.
However these commercial ink-jet printers are far removed from what one might call a home 3D printer, and the ability to pattern structures using metallic nanoparticles dissolved in liquids, pastes, or resins, which would form the electrodes for such a n OLED display are already far beyond the abilities of most 3D printers available to consumers. But let’s say you are able to secure the proper metallic nanoparticles, correctly dissolve them in a solvent, curing agent, and wetting agent, and ink-jet print them on a substrate, once you have UV cured such material, you would have to find a conductive polymer that would be able to be printed on the nanoparticles to create the anode, among the simplest part of the OLED display.
Printing the ‘active’ layers of the OLED display would involve using a special nozzle for your 3D printer that could atomize the inks into droplets that are in the tens of micrometers, and you would have to precisely control the concentration of the ink and spray timing to make sure your layers are uniform, so this is not done with an EasyBake Oven. We could go on about successive layers, light extraction, the OLED materials themselves, and the fact that the entire printing process described in the article was done on a 143 lb. robotic gantry, involved significant additional equipment owned by the college, and was only 64 x 64 pixels in size, but even the article itself did not point to the concept that by creating a completely ink-jet printed flexible OLED display under laboratory conditions, it meant in any way that this technology could be transferred to the average basement tinkerer. It is a disservice to the OLED industry and the billions of dollars spent on both R&D and mechanical engineering to lead blog readers along such a path. Someday there might be a way to commercially ink-jet print all of the structures in a flexible OLED display, but we expect it will take quite some time for that process to find its way into the basement, but if it does, don’t forget to keep those droplets uniform!
The production of flexible OLED displays is a complex process, typically involving spin-coating, sputtering, and plasma based deposition tools. In some cases ink-jet printing is used to lay successive layers of organic and inorganic encapsulation material to keep air and water vapor from destroying OLED materials that are particularly sensitive to these elements. There are a small number of OLED display manufacturers that use ink-jet printing to pattern the OLED materials themselves and the recently described QD/OLED displays from Samsung Display use IJP to pattern quantum dots on OLED materials.
However these commercial ink-jet printers are far removed from what one might call a home 3D printer, and the ability to pattern structures using metallic nanoparticles dissolved in liquids, pastes, or resins, which would form the electrodes for such a n OLED display are already far beyond the abilities of most 3D printers available to consumers. But let’s say you are able to secure the proper metallic nanoparticles, correctly dissolve them in a solvent, curing agent, and wetting agent, and ink-jet print them on a substrate, once you have UV cured such material, you would have to find a conductive polymer that would be able to be printed on the nanoparticles to create the anode, among the simplest part of the OLED display.
Printing the ‘active’ layers of the OLED display would involve using a special nozzle for your 3D printer that could atomize the inks into droplets that are in the tens of micrometers, and you would have to precisely control the concentration of the ink and spray timing to make sure your layers are uniform, so this is not done with an EasyBake Oven. We could go on about successive layers, light extraction, the OLED materials themselves, and the fact that the entire printing process described in the article was done on a 143 lb. robotic gantry, involved significant additional equipment owned by the college, and was only 64 x 64 pixels in size, but even the article itself did not point to the concept that by creating a completely ink-jet printed flexible OLED display under laboratory conditions, it meant in any way that this technology could be transferred to the average basement tinkerer. It is a disservice to the OLED industry and the billions of dollars spent on both R&D and mechanical engineering to lead blog readers along such a path. Someday there might be a way to commercially ink-jet print all of the structures in a flexible OLED display, but we expect it will take quite some time for that process to find its way into the basement, but if it does, don’t forget to keep those droplets uniform!
Droplet Shaping Characteristics based on Compression Depth - Source: See Citation
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