Reliability of organic light-emitting diodes in low-temperature environment*

Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) is an electroluminescent technology that relies on charge-carrier dynamics and is a potential light source for variable environmental conditions. Here, by exploiting a self-developed low-temperature testing system, we investigated the characteristics of hole/electron transport, electro-optic conversion efficiency, and operation lifetime of OLEDs at low-temperature ranging from –40 °C to 0 °C and room temperature (25 °C). Compared to devices operating at room temperature, the carrier transport capability is significantly decreased with reducing temperature, and especially the mobility of the hole-transporting material (HTM) and electron-transporting material (ETM) at –40 °C decreases from 1.16 × 10 −6 cm 2 /V⋅s and 2.60 × 10 −4 cm 2 /V⋅s to 6.91 × 10 −9 cm 2 /V⋅s and 1.44 × 10 −5 cm 2 /V⋅s, respectively. Indeed, the temperature affects differently on the mobilities of HTM and ETM, which favors unbalanced charge-carrier transport and recombination in OLEDs, thereby leading to the maximum current efficiency decreased from 6.46 cd⋅A −1 at 25 °C to 2.74 cd⋅A −1 at –40 °C. In addition, blue fluorescent OLED at –20 °C has an above 56% lifetime improvement (time to 80% of the initial luminance) over the reference device at room temperature, which is attributed to efficiently dissipating heat generated inside the device by the low-temperature environment.