Electroactive materials capability

A brief guide to CSIRO's electroactive materials capabilities.

• 5 December 2007 | Updated 14 October 2011

• Electroactive materials capability
• How CSIRO uses this capability

Imagine portable electronic devices where the plastic casing is actually a solar cell. Flat batteries will be a thing of the past.

Imagine a rollout/foldout screen from your mobile phone that allows you to watch full colour TV, a movie, or read the newspaper or your favourite novel with all the convenience of a flexible A4-sized format?

The convergence of nanotechnology, conducting polymers and methods for controlling polymer structure on a molecular level, forms the basis of an emerging technology that is turning these ideas in to reality.

Electroactive materials capability

The efforts of CSIRO's Electroactive Materials group are supported by facilities and instrumentation for:

• structure/property charactersation
• scaling up laboratory procedures to pilot plant volumes through to device fabrication
• testing.

Materials discovery and optimisation is based on high-throughput methodologies integrating computational modelling design of experiments (DoE) and parallel and high-throughput synthesis, purification and characterisation.

Our scale-up facilities are equipped with temperature controlled reactors with capacities ranging from several litres (L) up to 500 L for polymer and precursor production.

Our specific areas of expertise include:

• synthentic inorganic, organic and polymer science
• surface science
• device fabrication for testing of new materials
• materials characterisation
• high throughput synthesis, processing and characterisation
• polymer design
• substrate modification
• encapsulation
• photo-physics
• printing
• barrier coatings.

How CSIRO uses this capability

CSIRO is using this capability to lead polymer science and develop the molecular building blocks that will form the basis of a plastic electronics revolution expected to transform our lives in areas such as:

• health
• sports and leisure
• entertainment
• communications
• media
• transport.

The Electroactive Materials group is developing new charge transporting, light harvesting and light emitting materials for application to a range of organic electronic applications.

Specific examples of applications include:

• organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs)
• organic photovoltaics (OPVs)
• organic field effect transistors (OFETs).

New materials are characterised on site by a wide variety of analytical and spectroscopic techniques. 

Film properties are analysed using a surface profilometer, Atomic Force Microscope and other electron microscopy techniques.

For in-application testing, a customised, inert atmosphere device fabrication facility is available. The heart of this facility is a dual glovebox containing a thin-film spin coater and a high vacuum evaporator.

The evaporator has six sources and is capable of carrying out co-depositions of materials like small molecule organics, salts and metals.

Electronic devices can be fully characterised inside the glovebox which eliminates the effects of oxygen and water. Alternatively, devices can be encapsulated and removed from the glovebox.

For the testing of organic solar cells, the lab is equipped with a 1 000 W AM (Air Mass), 1.5 Solar Simulator and an Incident Photon Conversion Efficiency system.

Learn more about our Developing high-throughput polymer science.