Effect of various microlens parameters on enhancement of light outcoupling efficiency of organic light emitting diode

• For a constant diameter, luminance of OLED improves with increase in H/D ratio of microlens array.
• For a given H/D ratio of microlens, luminance increases for larger diameter of microlens.
• Higher improvement was observed for blue OLED, which is explained by wavelength dependence of refractive index of PDMS.

Since organic light emitting diode (OLED) is a multilayer device where each layer has different refractive index, total internal reflection (TIR) plays an important role in limiting the efficiency of an OLED. Due to the presence of TIR, a major portion of light is trapped within the device in various wave guiding modes. Of the total light trapped in an OLED, we address only the part that is lost due to wave guiding mode arising from refractive index mismatch at the glass-air interface. Microlens array, to improve luminance, is a method that can be externally applied to the OLEDs without altering its electrical characteristics and is easy to use. Microlens arrays ranging from 10 to 40 μm have been fabricated using an organic elastomeric material polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) by mold transfer technique. Maximum improvement of 25% in outcoupling efficiency for blue OLED is reported upon using the microlens array with diameter 10 μm. For a given diameter of microlens, out-coupling efficiency of OLED increases as height to diameter (H/D) ratio of microlens array approaches 0.5 (perfect hemisphere). It is also observed that outcoupling efficiency increases with the diameter of microlens for a given H/D ratio. The best luminescence improvement was observed for blue OLED, which can be explained by the higher refractive index of PDMS at lower wavelengths.

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