Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) have raised significant attention both in science and industry because of potential display and lighting applications. Benefiting from favorable features such as homogenous large-area emission, lightweight and ultra-thin device setups, OLEDs are expected to become a competitive candidate in the future lighting market. In addition, unique characteristics such as flexibility in OLEDs allow for new concepts for the design of lighting products.

To realize practical lighting application, the efficacy and stability of the flexible OLEDs require further improvement. Thus, the combined scientific efforts of researchers on both material synthesis and device fabrication are the prerequisite for successful research on these topics.

Within this project, two teams from China and Austria will jointly develop organic semiconductor materials for high performance flexible OLEDs. The research team led by Prof. Johannes Fröhlich at the Institute of Applied Synthetic Chemistry (Vienna University of Technology) will develop novel organic materials with desirable material characteristics with regard to thermal stability, charge transport and performance in optoelectronics for OLEDs by designing rigid planarized molecular frameworks. The key aspect will be the introduction of nitrogen atoms to the indolocarbazole scaffold in order to tune charge transport properties. The research team led by Prof. Dongge Ma in the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry (Chinese Academy of Sciences) will focus on developing high performance flexible OLEDs by combining both material and device engineering. Particularly the design of more efficient organic heterojunctions with non-doping systems to construct high performance tandem flexible OLEDs will be matter of interest.

As a result, the major goal of this project is to understand the relationships between material characteristics, device architectures and device performances. Hence, the intense collaboration of the material scientists in the Prof. Fröhlich group and the device engineers in the Prof. Ma group will trigger a valuable feedback loop in order to improve the OLED technology and, thus, to impact future lightning developments.