Low-Voltage Tunable Polyvinyl Chloride/Ionic Liquid Gel-Based Lenticular Microlens Arrays for 2D/3D Switchable Displays

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel is a soft and highly transparent electroactive polymer. Compared to liquid crystal lenses and liquid lenses, PVC gel-based lenses offer advantages such as compactness, polarization independence, and immunity to gravity effects. These characteristics make them highly promising for applications in imaging, sensing, optical communication, biomedical engineering, and displays. However, their practical use has been limited by the high driving voltage required. This work investigates the influence of doping PVC gels with ionic liquids (ILs) of varying content and anion-to-cation volume ratios on the performance of PVC gel-based lenticular microlenses (LMAs). For a pitch of 60 μm, doping small amounts of ILs reduces the driving voltage from 50 V to below 10 V. Additionally, the response time can be shortened by lowering the surface energy of the substrate. The optimized PVC/IL gel-based LMA has been successfully applied to a 2D/3D switchable display. By adjusting the voltage to control the focal length of the PVC/IL gel-based LMA, displays with different viewing angles can be achieved.