Unraveling the degradation mechanism in FIrpic based Blue OLEDs: II. Trap and detect molecules at the interfaces

TL;DR

This study investigates the degradation pathways of the blue OLED emitter FIrpic, revealing ligand loss as a key degradation mechanism and demonstrating how in-situ trapping of degradation products can be effectively achieved and studied.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simple protocol for analyzing degradation pathways in iridium complexes and highlights the importance of host matrices in trapping degradation products.

Findings

FIrpic degrades via loss of the picolinate ligand

Degradation products can be trapped as BPhen derivatives

The protocol effectively studies OLED material stability

Abstract

The impact of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) in modern life is witnessed by their wide employment in full-color, energy-saving, flat panel displays and smart-screens; a bright future is likewise expected in the field of solid state lighting. Cyclometalated iridium complexes are the most used phosphorescent emitters in OLEDs due to their widely tunable photophysical properties and their versatile synthesis. Blue-emitting OLEDs, suffer from intrinsic instability issues hampering their long term stability. Backed by computational studies, in this work we studied the sky-blue emitter FIrpic in both ex-situ and in-situ degradation experiments combining complementary, mutually independent, experiments including chemical metathesis reactions, in liquid phase and solid state, thermal and spectroscopic studies and LC-MS investigations. We developed a straightforward protocol to evaluate the degradation pathways in iridium complexes, finding that FIrpic degrades through the loss of the picolinate ancillary ligand. The resulting iridium fragment was than efficiently trapped "in-situ" as BPhen derivative 1. This process is found to be well mirrored when a suitably engineered, FIrpic-based, OLED is operated and aged. In this paper we (i) describe how it is possible to effectively study OLED materials with a small set of readily accessible experiments and (ii) evidence the central role of host matrix in trapping experiments.