Finland's VTT Technical Research Centre developed a new technique to deposit patterned OLED lighting elements on flexible plastic films. This could enable a low-cost process technology to make flexible light emitting structured films - which they see used mostly in advertisement campaigns.
The new room-temperature deposition technology uses standard traditional gravure and screen printing - which means it may be possible to use in regular printing houses. The process makes OLED lighting stripes which are 0.2 mm thick and uses polymer based OLED emitters.
VTT says that currently those printed OLEDs suffer from a relatively low lifetime (they will "emit light for around a year") - mostly because they need to find a better encapsulation technology. The polymer-based materials are likely to be less efficient compared to small-molecule OLEDs as well.
