Development of Uniform Polydimethylsiloxane Arrays through Inkjet Printing

The inkjet printing method is a promising method to deposit polymer and functional nanoparticles at the microscale. It can be applied in the fabrication of multicolor polymer light emitting diodes (polyLEDs), polymer base electronics, multicolor color conversion layers, and quantum dot light emitting diodes (QLEDs). One of the main challenges is to print high-resolution polymer dots from dilute polymer solution. In addition, the quality of printed multicolor polyLEDs, QLEDs and multicolor color conversion layers is currently limited by non-uniformity of the printed dots. In this paper, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is selected as the functional polymer, due to its high transparency, good reflective index value, inflammable and flexible properties. The optimal ink to form a uniform PDMS dot array is presented in this paper. Both the solvent and PDMS were tuned to form the uniform PDMS dot array. The uniform PDMS dot array was printed with a diameter of around 50 µm, and the array of closely spaced green quantum dots (QDs) mixed with PDMS ink was also printed on the substrate uniformly. While the green QD-PDMS film was printed at a resolution of 1693 dpi, the uniformity was evaluated using the photoluminescence (PL) spectrum and color coordinate value.