[vmelkon]

Has anyone tried to make one of these light emitting plastics at home?

[jeffrey.struss]

Descibing them as plastics is often a misnomer. They require a conductive transparent substrate, which can be flexible conductive plastic. Upon which the emitting material is deposited (either via vapor, thin-film, etc.)

I used to work in a Lab at a university that made them all the way to the device stage (just as test base), we made large red OLEDs.

Anthracene is commonly indicated as an example material. It requires somewhat high voltages though (I think around 50V or so) and has a low relative QE and stability but is pretty cheap to get a hold of.

[408]

I used to make blue ones of novel polymers.... polymers which even I would be hesitant to make at home....volatile Ni(0) catalysts...ew

But you can buy polydioctylfluorene, a blue emitter, and spincoat(tape substrate to a PC fan) it on transparent conducting oxide plates, and make the other electrode by exploding some wire ontop.  Of course you can get more hardcore by adding a layer of PEDOT.PSS which slows either holes or e-, I forget, in any case it makes the holes and e- recombine in the polymer layer making for a brighter device.

[vmelkon]

Descibing them as plastics is often a misnomer. They require a conductive transparent substrate, which can be flexible conductive plastic. Upon which the emitting material is deposited (either via vapor, thin-film, etc.)

I used to work in a Lab at a university that made them all the way to the device stage (just as test base), we made large red OLEDs.

Anthracene is commonly indicated as an example material. It requires somewhat high voltages though (I think around 50V or so) and has a low relative QE and stability but is pretty cheap to get a hold of.

I thought you could paint them onto a substrate. At least, there is some version of these polymers that dissolve in some stuff.

There is also tetracene. It is a orange compound.

I don't know if I can get anthracene. Is it used in some everyday thing?

[408]

I thought you could paint them onto a substrate. At least, there is some version of these polymers that dissolve in some stuff.

Paint no, you will have bad resistance conformity, likely giving burnthrough.

What you do is spin coat a solution of the polymer.  This is easily improvised with duct tape and a PC fan. Spin coating gives relatively homogeneous films. 

[jeffrey.struss]

Yeah the lab I worked in actually used functionalized pentacenes as red emitters. It appears all of the acenes OLED (albeit heptacene is as high as they go).

The methods for application are usually either vacuum deposition or spin coating. Both will give you a more uniform thin film than "painting" it on.

Descibing them as plastics is often a misnomer. They require a conductive transparent substrate, which can be flexible conductive plastic. Upon which the emitting material is deposited (either via vapor, thin-film, etc.)

I used to work in a Lab at a university that made them all the way to the device stage (just as test base), we made large red OLEDs.

Anthracene is commonly indicated as an example material. It requires somewhat high voltages though (I think around 50V or so) and has a low relative QE and stability but is pretty cheap to get a hold of.

I thought you could paint them onto a substrate. At least, there is some version of these polymers that dissolve in some stuff.

There is also tetracene. It is a orange compound.

I don't know if I can get anthracene. Is it used in some everyday thing?