This may seem something impossible and strange to you, but is absolutely true. Engineers of University of California, Los Angels have created a fully Stretchable OLED. The engineers took a stretchable light-emitting plastic and discovered a way of creating a carbon nanotube and polymer electrode and layered it over the stretchable plastic to complete this Stretchable OLED.

The device made by the engineers is a  two-centimeter square with a one-centimeter square area that gives off a blue light. It was not an easy task because there are lots of design challenges in creating stretchable electronics. The first one starts with nanotubes themselves. Nanotubes are stretchable and are conductive, but to keep their shape, they need to be attached to some surface.

The engineers of UCLA demonstrated their invention. They achieved the feat by sandwiching a carbon nanotube-polymer blend on either side of a light-emitting plastic. Now another drawback is this that the carbon nanotube film is rough and can cause shorting, according to Zhenan Bao, a Stanford University professor of chemical engineering who works on stretchable solar cells. “Using this method, they ended up with a relatively flat surface that can be used for an electrode.”

But there is still a lot of work to be done if we want to make stretchable electronics our future. There are many drawbacks still remaining. For example, stretchable electronics demonstrated thus far lose conductivity after being stretched too far or too many times, so more research is needed.

If the technology of creating stretchable electronics is enhanced, then we can get some shocking inventions from this technology. For example, in future we can get a fully stretchable video display that could be rolled up and tucked into a shirt pocket, or cell phones that could swell or shrink. In the stream of medical sciences, we can get electronic sheets draped like cloth. How amazing is its imagination! isn’t it?

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