High triplet hexahydroacridine derivatives as a host prevent exciton diffusion to adjacent layers in solution processed OLEDs

One important key to improve OLEDs technology is the development and synthesis of high triplet energy host materials, which play a crucial role in improving the efficiency and lifetime. The present approach shows that it is possible to control the properties of the host materials by carefully selecting the units. Therefore, a hexahydroacridine derivative was chosen to increase the E_T value due to lower conjugation. In this study, three hosts with high triplet energy (>3 eV) were designed and investigated based on hexahydroacridine (ACD) as a constant unit and branches of triphenylamine (TPA), pyrene and pyridine derivatives as different groups. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations showed the agreement of the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) values with the experimental results, with the highest HOMO from DFT calculation at 5.95 eV and cyclic voltammetry (CV) at 6.09 eV for the ACD-PYRIDINE. The photophysical properties were fully discussed and revealed the fluorescence mechanism of the hosts, so that with the addition of 9-[4-(4,6-diphenyl-1,3,5-triazin-2-yl)phenyl]-N3, N3, N6, N6-tetraphenyl-9H-carbazole-3,6-diamine (DACT-II), thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) was achieved in the emitter layer with different concentrations of the hosts of 50, 70 and 90 wt%. The promising synthesized hosts were used for the fabrication of green TADF OLEDs. The fabricated OLED based on 90 % wt. ACD-TPA had CIE coordinates X = 0.26385 and Y = 0.55236, with turn on voltage 3.5 V, as well as current efficiency (CE), power efficiency (PE) and external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 40 cd A⁻¹, 26 lm.W⁻¹ and 13 %, respectively. Furthermore, the extracted brightness (52508 cd m⁻²) exceeded the values from previous studies based on acridine as an emitter layer in doped OLEDs.