Passive cooling of large-area organic light-emitting diodes

• Large-area organic light-emitting diodes are simulated using finite element methods.
• Temperature and luminance distributions are reported.
• Advanced convection modelling using computational fluid dynamics is analysed.
• Great agreement between simulation and measurement is achieved.
• Advanced convection modelling is recommended for many large-area applications.

The authors investigated passive cooling of large-area organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with special focus on convective cooling. Electro-optical and thermal behaviour of large-area OLED devices are therefore modelled using finite element method (FEM) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Resulting temperature and luminance distributions are compared with measurement data at different driving conditions and test setups. The investigation yields that including laterally resolved convection coefficients from CFD simulations greatly improves model accuracy compared to simpler convection estimations. These findings are important for OLED and their heat spreader design especially for features like flexible, transparent, high-power and or large-area due to their specific limitations for heat spreading and or their high heat spreading requirements.

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