Encapsulating light-emitting electrochemical cells for improved performance

Abstract

We present a functional and scalable encapsulation of light-emitting electrochemical cells (LECs), which results in a measured ambient operation of >400 h at a brightness of >300 cd/m2 with a maximum efficacy of 6 lm/W, and a linearly extrapolated ambient operation of ∼5600 h at >100 cd/m2. Our findings suggest that previous studies have underestimated the practical stability of appropriately encapsulated LECs. We also report that the dominant ambient degradation for non-encapsulated LECs is water-induced delamination of the cathode from the active layer, while encapsulated LECs in contrast are found to decay from spatial variations in the active layer composition.