Reducing electronic waste with biodegradable luminescent polymers
Scientific Achievement
A strategy is presented to use a cleavable moiety to create depolymerizable and recyclable thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) polymers without compromising their light-emitting efficiencies.
Significance and Impact
These polymers can be depolymerized under mild acidic or heating conditions, with precise control of the kinetics and within a time window of several days to minutes. The discovery has the potential to reduce electronic waste and develop new applications for luminescent polymers.
Research Details
- Electroluminescent devices based on TADF polymers achieved an external quantum efficiency up to 15.1%, an order of magnitude improvement.
About Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials
The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit https://science.osti.gov/User-Facilities/User-Facilities-at-a-Glance.
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