Suppressing triplet exciton quenching by regulating the triplet energy of crosslinkable hole transport materials for efficient solution-processed TADF OLEDs

Abstract

Crosslinkable hole transport materials (HTMs) with high triplet energies would have a balance of carrier injection into the emitting material layer, suppressing the triplet exciton quenching and resulting in high-performance solution-processed organic light-emitting diode (OLED) devices. Two novel crosslinkable HTMs with different central units, N2, N8-di-p-tolyl-N2,N8-bis(4-vinylphenyl)dibenzo[b,d]thiophene-2,8-diamine (V-p-DBT) and N2,N8-di-p-tolyl-N2,N8-bis(4-vinylphenyl)dibenzo[b,d]furan-2,8-diamine (V-p-DBF), were designed and synthesized. The use of dibenzothiophene and dibenzofuran units increases the torsion angle compared with the commonly used N, N′-di-p-tolyl-N, N′-bis(4-vinylphenyl)-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4,4′-diamine (V-p-TPD), leading to high triplet energies of 2.57 and 2.64 eV, respectively. The triplet energies of V-p-DBT and V-p-DBF effectively suppress triplet exciton quenching. Furthermore, the crosslinked HTM layer showed excellent solvent-resistant abilities and high thermal stability. An outstanding maximum current efficiency (CEmax) of 79.94 cd A−1 and maximum external quantum efficiency (EQEmax) of 24.35% were obtained by V-p-DBF-based green thermally activated delayed fluorescent (TADF) OLEDs. This work provides a new molecular design strategy for achieving efficient solution-processed TADF OLEDs.