Novel polymer as liquid crystal alignment material for plastic substrates

Abstract

Implementation of the roll-to-roll (R2R) process and printable organic electronics realizes the cost reduction potential of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) on plastic substrates. These innovative technologies put a strong limitation on the chemistry and temperature treatment of the LC alignment material applied at the solid–liquid interface inside the LCD. Alignment material is the last uniform layer deposited on each of the substrates before assembling and sealing of the whole display sandwich. Deposition from an aggressive solvent, vacuum deposition or a high baking temperature can not only destroy the complex composite structure of the electronics but can also affect the material properties of the substrate. We developed a new type of polymer alignment material, B-15, which can be deposited from a non-aggressive solvent (ethyl/butyl acetate) on top of the wide range of organic layers (including UV-curable materials and TAC films of plastic polarizer) without barrier layers for chemical protection. B-15 is suitable for the R2R process for only short-time treatment operations: 5 min baking at 90 °C is sufficient to remove the residual solvent and hard baking is not required. First, the rubbing process produces an alignment direction on the surface with the azimuthal anchoring energy over 10−4 J m−2. Next, non-polarized light exposure with a 254 nm Hg line induces photopolymerization, which also shifts the absorption peak far below the 300 nm wavelength. Thus B-15 is a highly photostable alignment material possessing null absorption in both the UV-A and the VIS ranges.