Sustainable Solution Processing for Additive Fabrication of Electronic Devices

Solution processed electronics often relying on halogenated solvents such as chloroform or chlorobenzene to dissolve polymeric semiconductors. These halogenated solvents are toxic to both the environment and human health. We have been working on developing methods to deposit elecronic materials with a scalable and less wasteful method, blade-coating, and with an eco-friendly alternative solvent, anisole. For blade-coating layers, we optimized printing parameters to demonstrate that printed interlayers can achieve comparable performance to spun interlayers in organic based devicess, with our best printed-interlayer devices exceeding the performance of spun devices. For the anisole active layer, we optimized the ink formulation by material loading to achieve similar solution viscosity and absorbance.These results indicate the potential for scalable fabrication with sustainable materials without sacrificing performance. Overall, this work advances our understanding of scalable manufacturing processes and use of eco-friendly solvents.