The development of thin film barriers for encapsulating organic electronics

In this work, we investigate several approaches to the development of encapsulation of organic electronics. A combination of plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition, atomic layer deposition, and physical vapor deposition are used to make single layer and multilayer thin films and study the impact of structure on effective water vapor transmission rates. It was found that multilayer thin films consisting of organic and inorganic layers as well as inorganic nanolaminates provided the highest performance barrier films with effective water vapor transmission rates less than 5 × 10^-5 g/m²/day. Materials such as atomic layer deposition deposited Al₂O₃ also showed excellent initial performance, but were found to be susceptible to corrosion from water. Combining alumina with other materials was found to improve the long-term performance of the alumina films. Integration of these films into organic solar cell platforms was shown to effectively maintain shelf lifetime performance for more than 7000 h.