Roller-Assisted Adhesion Imprinting for High-Throughput Manufacturing of Wearable and Stretchable Organic Light-Emitting Devices

Stretchable organic optoelectronic devices have been developed rapidly in the last few years due to their great potential in wearable electronics. Although high performance is obtained, high-throughput manufacturing of these devices is still a challenge for their commercial application. Here, a roller-assisted adhesion imprinting (RAI) technique is developed to overcome this challenge by rapid production of ordered and large-area wrinkled structures on organic optoelectronic devices to enable their stretchability. Different from the conventional imprinting technology requiring heating or ultraviolet treatment, adhesion force is employed innovatively in the RAI process to form microstructures within the imprinted materials. As a demonstration, a stretchable wrinkled structure with its length of more than 10 cm is rapidly fabricated and larger area is available by continuous imprinting. Stretchable organic light-emitting devices (SOLEDs) are easily manufactured by the RAI process. The SOLEDs can be elongated to 100% strain and keep working with 5% current efficiency variation after 35000 cycles of stretching with 20% tensile strain. This is the best mechanical stability of SOLEDs reported to date. The development of the high-throughput, large-area, and cost-effective RAI technique provides potential roll-to-roll continuous production of stretchable electronics.