Highly Air-Stable, Flexible, and Water-Resistive 2D Titanium Carbide MXene-Based RGB Organic Light-Emitting Diode Displays for Transparent Free-Form Electronics

Flexible see-through displays are considered to be the next generation smart display, providing improved information flow, safety, situational awareness, and overall user experience in smart windows, automotive displays, glass-form biomedical displays, and augmented reality systems. 2D titanium carbides (MXenes) are promising material as electrodes of the transparent and flexible displays due to their high transparency, metallic conductivity, and flexibility. However, current MXene-based devices have insufficient air stability and lack engineering schemes to develop matrix-addressable display forms with sufficient pixels to display information. Here, we develop an ultraflexible and environmentally stable MXene-based organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display by combining high performance MXene electrodes, flexible OLEDs, and ultrathin and functional encapsulation systems. The MXene material was synthesized and used to fabricate a highly reliable MXene-based OLED that can stably operate in air condition for over 2000 h, endure repetitive bending deformation of 1.5 mm radius, and maintain environmental stability for 6 h when exposed to wet surroundings. The RGB MXene-based OLEDs were fabricated, (1691 cd m-2 at 40.4 mA cm-2 for red, 1377 cd m-2 at 4.26 mA cm-2 for green, and 1475 cd m-2 at 18.6 mA cm-2 for blue) and a matrix-addressable transparent OLED display was demonstrated that could display letters and shapes.