Highly efficient blue organic light-emitting diodes using various hole and electron confinement layers

In this Letter, blue phosphorescence organic light-emitting diodes （PHOLEDs） employ structures for electron and/or hole confinement; 1,3,5-tris（N-phenylbenzimiazole-2-yl）benzene is used as a hole confinement layer and tris-（phenylpyrazole）iridium [Ir（ppz）3] is utilized for an electron confinement layer （ECL）. The electrical and optical properties of the fabricated blue PHOLEDs with various carrier-confinement structures are analyzed. Structures with a large ehergy offset between the carrier confinement and emitting layers enhance the charge-carrier balance in the emitting region, resulting from the effective carrier confinement. The maximum external quantum efficiency of the blue PHOLEDs with the double-ECLs is 24.02% at 1500 cd/m^2 and its luminous efficiency is 43.76 cd/A, which is 70.47% improved compared to the device without a carrier-confinement layer.

Improvement of silicon etching resolution using the confined etchant layer technique

WHEN scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) with feedback mode is used to etchcertain surface, the etchant molecules generated at a microelectrode diffuse to the surface andreact therein with the surface species, resulting in local etching pattern. It is noted that theetching resolution of SECM is dominantly determined by the size of the microelectrode.However, many experimental results have shown the significant influence of the lateral diffu-sion of etchant on the etching resolution. Therefore, a thin diffusion layer of the

Tuning the oxidation state of Ru to surpass Pt in hydrogen evolution reaction

The high price of state-of-the-art Pt electrocatalysts has plagued the acidic water electrolysis technique for decades. As a cheaper alternative to Pt, ruthenium is considered an inferior hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalyst than Pt due to its high susceptibility to oxidation and loss of activity. Herein, we reveal that the HER activity on Ru based catalysts could surpass Pt via tuning Ru oxidation state. Specifically, RuP clusters encapsulated in few layers of N, P-doped carbon (RuP@NPC) display a minimum over potential of 15.6 mV to deliver 10 mA·cm^(−2). Moreover, we for the first time show that a Ru based catalyst could afford current density up to 4 A·cm^(−2) in a practical water electrolysis cell, with voltage even lower than the Pt/C-based cell, as well as high robustness during 200 h operation. Using a combination of experiment probing and calculation, we postulate that the suitably charged Ru (∼ +2.4) catalytic center is the origin for its superior catalytic behavior. While the moderately charged Ru is empowered with optimized H adsorption behavior, the carbon encapsulation layers protect RuP clusters from over oxidation, thereby conferring the catalyst with high robustness.

The coupling effect of slow-rate mechanical motion on the confined etching process in electrochemical mechanical micromachining

By introducing the mechanical motion into the confined etchant layer technique(CELT), we have developed a promising ultraprecision machining method, termed as electrochemical mechanical micromachining(ECMM), for producing both regular and irregular three dimensional(3 D) microstructures. It was found that there was a dramatic coupling effect between the confined etching process and the slow-rate mechanical motion because of the concentration distribution of electrogenerated etchant caused by the latter. In this article, the coupling effect was investigated systemically by comparing the etchant diffusion, etching depths and profiles in the non-confined and confined machining modes. A two-dimensional(2 D) numerical simulation model was proposed to analyze the diffusion variations during the ECMM process, which is well verified by the machining experiments. The results showed that, in the confined machining mode, both the machining resolution and the perpendicularity tolerance of side faces were improved effectively. Furthermore, the theoretical modeling and numerical simulations were proved valuable to optimize the technical parameters of the ECMM process.