Deuterium

Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, Inc. (CIL) has acquired an additional 14.8 acres of land at its Cambridge Isotope Separations (CIS) Xenia, Ohio location. Mike Steiger, Vice President of Engineering and Project Execution for CIL, stated that the new land purchase will ensure easier access to utilities for future expansion.

Facility Aerial Photo

This newly acquired land is situated to the west of the 20 acres purchased in 2017, which is currently the site of the North Star expansion project. This recently completed project will greatly increase 13C production and is in the startup phase. North Star is the largest 13C separation facility ever built in the world and will significantly increase CIL’s capacity ensuring customer reliability for this stable isotope.

Researchers from Tsinghua University in Shenzhen, China, have managed to dramatically increase the stability of OLED devices by the adoption of deuterated host material.

The researchers, led by Prof. Man-Chung Tang, have designed and synthesized deuterated anthracene-based hydrocarbon PNA as the new host material. The researchers have observed that the faraday loss decreases with the increase of the deuteration degree.

OLED displays have been gaining popularity rapidly, and are already the dominant smartphone display technology. OLEDs are also the display technology of choice in the smartwatch market, making inroads into the TV, monitor, laptop and tablet markets. The future of the OLED industry looks bright.

In recent years, the focus of the industry, beyond increasing capacity and reducing production costs, has been improving the performance of OLEDs in the areas of display brightness, efficiency, and lifetime. Brightness is required in many applications - from TVs (for HDR and to view in ambient lighting) through smartphones (outdoor viewing) to automotive, and efficiency is a plus in any scenario (but mostly in mobile displays). Display lifetime is already good enough for many applications, but in some cases (like automotive, and IT displays) it is critical. These three properties usually go together - if you can make more efficient OLED displays, you can drive them at a lower current to achieve the same brightness, and so lifetime increases, or you can achieve higher brightness, etc. 

This is a sponsored post by Clearsynth

In the ever-evolving field of display technology, OLED displays have emerged as a prominent player due to their ability to deliver stunning visuals, energy efficiency, and flexibility.

One key component that has contributed to the success of OLED displays is deuterium, a stable isotope of hydrogen. Deuterium's impact on OLED displays can be seen in its potential to magnify these devices' overall performance and lifespan.

• Deuterium (2H, D): Discovered in 1931 by H. Urey, who won the Nobel Prize in 1934 and named it Deuterium.
• Stable, nonradioactive isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron in its nucleus
• Natural abundance of 0.015% of hydrogen atoms on Earth

Deuterium, a heavier isotope than hydrogen, offers several advantages in OLED displays. First and foremost, deuterium is known to increase the brightness and efficiency of OLED displays. TV Panel manufacturers use OLED materials to generate the 3 primary colours (red, green, blue) in full-colour display. They had a challenge of large electronic power consumption for blue OLED relative to green and red OLEDs. This has been successfully overcome by deuterated blue OLED emitters which provide higher stability and prolonged lifetime, resulting in greater brightness and efficiency.

In 2021, LG Display started to adopt deuterated OLED compounds in its WOLED panels, to improve the lifetime, efficiency and brightness. Today, all of LG's WOLED TV panels use deuterated blue OLED emitters, in which hydrogen is replaced by its more stable isotope, deuterium. The higher stability enables longer lifetime, which in turn enables higher brightness and efficiency.

It is now reported in Korea that LG Display now aims to expand the adoption of deuterated OLED compounds to its red and green and yellow emitters, and also other layers in the OLED stack. If this report is true, it means that LGD will also use the technology in its mobile (p-OLED) panels, not just its OLED TV ones. 

In 2020, LG Chem announced that it has sold most of its LCD polarizer business to China’s Ningbo Shanshan, in a $1.1 billion deal. LG Chem retained its automotive LCD polarizer and its OLED polarizer businesses. The company now announced that it sold all of its remaining display polarizer business to two companies, for around $800 million deal - the polarizer materials business to Hefei Xinmei Materials Technology ($616 million) and the polarizer production business to Shanjin Optoelectronics ($200 million).

LG Chem aims to focus on its main growth engines, namely battery materials, green materials and life sciences. The company did not detail its plans for its remaining OLED businesses.

Researchers from Japan's Keio University, in collaboration with Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, developed a new method to accelerate the design of OLED materials, using a combination of classical computing with quantum computing.

The new approach combines a 'classic' machine learning model with a quantum-classical computational molecular design. Demonstrating the new approach, the researchers discovered a highly efficient OLED emitter, a deuterated derivative of Alq₃. The new emitter is not only highly efficient, it is also easy to synthesize. 

DSCC expects the AMOLED stack material market to grow 4% in 2023, to $1.4 billion, and to reach $2.18 billion in 2027, that's a 12% CAGR from 2023 to 2027. In 2022, the market declined by 10%. The forecast does not include any UDC revenues from blue PHOLED materials, which means that if UDC succeeds in commercializing its blue material, revenues could be higher by hundreds of millions of dollars.

DSCC says that demand for OLED TVs will continue to decline in 2023. In 2022, revenues of OLED TV revenues declined by 17%, and in 2023 revenues will decline 3% further. Growth will resume, though, in 2024, and in 2023-2027 the market will grow at a CAGR of 13%.

The following is a sponsored post by Cambridge Isotope Laboratories

OLED has become the display technology of choice for many commercial products such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, TVs, automotive dashboards and wearables. OLED has advantages with improved image quality (better contrast, higher brightness, fuller viewing angle, wider color range, and faster refresh rates), lower power consumption, and simpler designs (ultra-thin, flexible, foldable, and transparent displays).

Cambridge Isotope Laboratories plant in Xenia, OH, USA

OLED, however, faces several technical challenges. While OLED TVs yield better picture quality than common LCDs, they are usually less bright. Research using a compound that has at least one hydrogen replaced with its heavier isotope, deuterium, is showing promise toward achieving greater brightness. Since the bonds between carbon and deuterium are stronger than those between carbon and hydrogen, materials made with deuterated compounds tend to have a longer lifetime, which allows OLED displays to run brighter but still last as long.

This is a sponsored post by WeylChem InnoTec and IT-Chem

To speed up material development and transfer laboratory results quickly and efficiently to mass production in highly competitive markets with short innovation cycles, WeylChem InnoTec combines its many years of in-depth electronic chemical process development expertise with IT-Chem's manufacturing excellence. WeylChem InnoTec and IT-Chem are aware of the increasing demand for deuterated materials and sublimation in the organic electronics industry and therefore operate cutting-edge technology for commercial scale deuterium oxide (D₂O) production and state-of-the-art sublimation quipment to enable material development to commercial manufacturing at both sites - a unique
offering in the CDMO landscape.

Benefits to electronic material companies from the strategic alliance are manifold - the supply of sublimated pilot quantities developed in Germany and, at the customer's discretion, manufacture and sublimation of commercial volumes in South Korea or Germany. The promise to customers is the seamless transfer or split of manufacture and sublimation of their products between production sites, if desired. The end-to-end solution offered by WeylChem InnoTec and IT-Chem enables fast, efficient, and flexible realization of customer’s projects from sampling to commercial quantities in reliably highest purity and deuteration levels.