Lifetime improvement of organic light-emitting diodes with a butterfly wing's scale-like nanostructure as a flexible encapsulation layer

• Biomimetic nanostructures like butterfly wing's scale are fabricated.
• The bio-inspiration nanostructures are fabricated with AAO templates.
• The bio-inspiration nanostructures exhibit hydrophobic properties.
• The nanostructures are applied as a flexible encapsulation layer in OLEDs.
• The nanostructures improve OLED's lifetime.

Biomimetic nanostructures like butterfly wing's scale were fabricated with an anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) nanoimprint lithography technique. This bio-inspiration nanostructure exhibits an intrinsic hydrophobic property and thus was applied as a flexible encapsulation layer in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) to improve device's lifetime. A ∼80% enhancement on lifetime was obtained with simply imprinting the biomimetic nanostructures onto the flexible substrates. Our work provides a simple encapsulation approach for OLEDs, especially for flexible OLEDs.

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