| Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) suffer rapid degradation upon exposure to moisture or oxygen and require a permeation barrier to extend their lifetime. The goal of this project was to prepare an ultra-hermetic encapsulation barrier for OLEDs that can be prepared by a simple, environmentally friendly process. The approach was to employ plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PE-CVD) of hexamethyl disiloxane (HMDSO, a non-toxic and inexpensive organo-siloxane) and O2, to grow thin SiO2-like barrier films directly on OLEDs. The encapsulation barrier discovered during the project is a flexible, homogeneous, single-layer barrier film grown in a single PE-CVD chamber. The barrier material is a single-phase hybrid with part-inorganic and part-polymeric character. The OLEDs coated with this barrier film were stored at 65°C in 85% relative humidity, an accelerated environmental test. These OLEDs keep functioning after more than one year of accelerated storage tests, surpassing any existing encapsulation barrier including the glass plate encapsulation. Barrier film when deposited on a steel foil substrate can be flexed between 1-2% tensile strains. Infrared absorption, wetting contact angle of water, indentation hardness, Young's modulus, and atomic force micrographs reflect the barrier as a homogeneous SiO2-like film with residual silicone character.;The permeation through the bulk of the barrier film is so slow that it exposes two secondary modes of moisture permeation. A relatively rapid degradation associated with particulate inclusions in the barrier, and the very slow degradation caused by permeation along barrier-substrate interfaces.;Even though it is prepared by a simple and inexpensive process, this film has shown superior barrier performance than multilayer barrier (alternate inorganic-polymeric films), the current encapsulation technology, which requires a complicated and costly process. |
