Degradation of organic light emitting diode: Heat related issues and solutions

Degradation of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) is the most serious obstacle towards their commercialization. OLED degrades due to various internal and external mechanisms. External degradation is mainly caused due to the instability of low work function cathode, pin-hole formation during fabrication which provides a path for oxygen and moisture infiltration. Operation of OLED also leads to degradation with major causes being morphological instability of organic layers, trap formation, indium or oxygen diffusion from anode, interface deterioration etc. Heat generation in the OLED also acts as a source of degradation. Most of the heat is generated instantaneously upon biasing of OLED due to resistive or Joule heating as a consequence of high resistance of organic layers and non-radiative recombination. Generated heat can be reduced by reducing the effects of the generation sources such as improving conductivity of organic layers by doping, using additional layers to improve charge injection, employing emissive layers with low recombination losses etc. However, these ways can only reduce the heat up to a certain amount. To further improve the lifetime of OLED, the generated heat can be dissipated by employing heat sinks using either thermally conducting substrate or encapsulation etc. We present a review on OLED degradation with a particular focus on heat generation, its consequences and ways of reduction. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.