The blue pixels in today’s phone and TV screens still rely on scarce, expensive metals and energy-hungry vacuum manufacturing. This Fellowship aims to replace those materials with a new class of light-emitting molecules—thermally activated delayed fluorescence dendrimers—that can be printed from solution, like ink, rather than deposited in a vacuum chamber. Current solution-printed OLEDs lag behind their vacuum-deposited counterparts, especially for blue light, which is both less efficient and less stable. The project tackles this by designing dendrimers that achieve high efficiency and colour purity without containing rare metals. A key innovation is an automated film-printing platform combined with machine learning, which will rapidly test and optimise new materials—replacing slow, manual trial-and-error. If successful, the work could make OLED displays cheaper to manufacture, less dependent on scarce resources, and more energy-efficient to produce. The researcher plans to commercialise the technology through a spin-out company, SolOLED, targeting the emerging market for solution-processed displays. While the immediate focus is on materials design and manufacturing methods, the fundamental advances in dendrimer chemistry could also inform future optoelectronic devices beyond displays.
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Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have steadily become the dominant display technology in electronic products such as mobile phones and TVs. There are, however, some structural weaknesses in these vacuum-deposited devices. These include the incorporation of scarce metals within the emitters of the device and reliance on energy-intensive and costly vacuum deposition technology. Thus, solutions are required to make these devices more sustainable, both in terms of the choice of material and the manufacture of the devices. An emerging alternative, solution-processing OLEDs, provides a route to cost-effective and simplified manufacture of these devices. Despite being cheaper, the current best solution-processed OLEDs still underperform their vacuum-deposited counterparts and still rely on scarce noble metal-based phosphors for red and green pixels and fluorescent materials for blue. This Fellowship will address the principal remaining materials challenge, which is the development of high-efficiency and stable blue solution-processable emitters for solution-processed OLEDs. Building on my group's core expertise in optoelectronic materials design and recent published and patented advances in an exciting class of emitter, thermally activated delayed fluorescence dendrimers, we will unleash their full potential to deliver high-performance blue emitters through a combination of innovative materials designs that address the colour point, efficiency and stability of the device. Key outcomes will also include a shift from traditional manual methods to a groundbreaking Automated Film Preparation Platform (AFPP) integrated with machine learning (ML) to enable rapid materials development and optimization, an innovative approach in SP-OLEDs. Aligned with EPSRC the priority areas "Photonic Materials" and "Manufacturing for the Future", the IP developed within the Fellowship is envisioned to be commercialized via a spin-out company SolOLED, with a mandate to deliver high-performance emitters for the emerging solution-processed OLED market.
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