OLED Durability and Performance

Investigating Organization
General Electric Global Research

Principal Investigator(s)
Anil Duggal, Anil.Duggal@crd.ge.com, (518) 387-7424

Subcontractor
None

Funding Source
BT/NETL SSL

Award
DOE Share: $2,951,064

Contract Period
9/1/00 - 11/15/03

GE Global Research conducted a three-year program to reduce the long-term technical risks that are keeping the lighting industry from embracing and developing OLEDs. The specific goal was a demonstration light panel that delivers white light with brightness and light quality comparable to a fluorescent source and with an efficacy better than that of an incandescent source. This required significant advances in three areas:  1) improvement in OLED energy efficiency at high brightness; 2) improvement of white light quality for illumination; and 3) the development of cost-effective, large-area fabrication techniques.

The technical effort was divided into three main technical phases designed to achieve a significant milestone at the end of each year.  In Phase I, GE developed a small area-efficient white light device. This task involved sourcing available blue polymers and using these to fabricate and evaluate device performance. One polymer was chosen for white device development. The key outcome of this phase was the first demonstration that high-illumination-quality white light could be generated using OLED technology.

Phase II focused on scaling up the white device manufacturer to a device measuring 36 square inches. In order to do this, new area-scalable device designs were developed to allow the development of large area OLEDs using low-cost techniques. The key outcome of this phase was the invention of a novel device design that is tolerant to manufacturing defects and scalable to large areas.

Phase III was devoted to improving the underlying OLED device efficiency and developing the technology and system optimization required to build a 2 ft. x 2 ft. demonstration panel for white-light illumination. The key outcome of this phase was a final 2 ft x 2ft OLED deliverable panel with the following "world-record” specifications:

• Color Temperature: 4000 K  Efficacy: 15 Lumen/Watt
• Color Rendering: 88 CRI  Light Output: 1200 Lumens

This project was successful both in meeting its technical objectives and in demonstrating to the lighting community that OLEDs are a potentially viable solid state lighting source. This is evidenced by the healthy quantity and variety of OLED lighting projects currently being funded by DOE.

Content dated 2/08