Mendips .....Manufacturing Emissive Nanotechnology Devices in Polymers

A consortium is building a pilot production line to manufacture OLED devices—the light-emitting layers found in phone screens and TV displays—using a coating process that deposits extremely thin polymer films. The problem is scale. OLEDs work beautifully in the lab, but moving from small test samples to reliable, high-volume manufacturing introduces challenges: uneven coating, defects, and material waste. The Mendips consortium aims to solve these by designing, procuring, and commissioning a state-of-the-art pilot facility that can produce both small-molecule and polymer OLEDs under controlled conditions. This lets them study exactly what goes wrong when you try to make thousands of devices instead of a handful. If successful, the project could give UK manufacturers a practical route to producing OLEDs at commercial scale. That matters for displays, lighting, and signage—but also for less visible applications like flexible sensors, medical imaging panels, and energy-efficient building materials. The work is applied, not fundamental: it targets a specific manufacturing bottleneck. A working pilot line would shorten the gap between a lab breakthrough and a product on the shelf.