S. JANIETZ Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research, Potsdam, Germany
Conjugated organic small molecules and polymers, offer the opportunity to produce devices on large area, low-cost and plastic planar substrates.
These materials are becoming increase attention also in the field of etextiles, because they show an interesting combination of electronic and mechanical properties that can be favourably exploited in smart textiles. A key step for the integration of mass production of e-textiles is to completely integrate electronic production with textile productions In the last years were reached progress in the development of fibers and there processing for application in e-textiles.
The application reached from fabric integrated light sources to low cost solid state lighting under the aspect of protection and security. Here are present on the one side the research results concerning the integration of encapsulate solid OLEDs and additionally also OLEDs fabricated on flexible high barrier substrates into textiles.
The first results concerning the realization of an OLED on cylindrical surfaces, were discussed based on solution processed technologies to go in direction of low cost processing. It was succeeded to realize a simply, inverted planar construction, based on solution processing.
This preliminary work was the precondition for the development of a fiber based OLED. It was demonstrated that OLEDs were prepared using glass fibers as substrates and solution processed active and hole-transport layers.
