LEDs can be stretched like rubber

December 10, 2013 | 14:37
LEDs can be stretched like rubber
LEDs can be stretched like rubber



Today's conventional inorganic electronic devices are brittle, and while they have a certain flexibility achieved using ultrathin layers of inorganic materials, these devices are either flexible, meaning they can be bent, or they are stretchable, containing a discrete LED chip interconnected with stretchable electrodes. But they lack "intrinsic stretchabilty," in which every part of the device is stretchable.


Now, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have demonstrated for the first time an intrinsically stretchable polymer light-emitting device. They developed a simple process to fabricate the transparent devices using single-walled carbon nanotube polymer composite electrodes. The interpenetrating networks of nanotubes and the polymer matrix in the surface layer of the composites lead to low sheet resistance, high transparency, high compliance and low surface roughness.






The authors of the project are UCLA postdoctoral fellow Zhibin Yu, UCLA professor of materials science and engineering Qibing Pei, Xiaofan Niu and Zhitian Liu. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, and recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Materials


Source: UCLA Newsroom

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