Directional Solution Coating by the Chinese Brush: A Facile Approach to Improving Molecular Alignment for High-Performance Polymer TFTs

Abstract

Directional solution coating by the Chinese brush provides a facile approach to fabricate highly oriented polymer thin films by finely controlling the wetting and dewetting processes under directional stress. The biggest advantage of the Chinese brush over the normal western brush is the freshly emergent hairs used, whose unique tapered structure renders a dynamic balance of the liquid within the brush by multiple forces when interacting with the liquid. Consequently, the liquid is steadily held within the brush without any unexpected leakage, making the liquid transfer proceed in a well-controllable manner. It is demonstrated that the Chinese brush coating enables the crystallization of the polymer and the self-assembly of conjugated backbones to proceed in a quasi-steady state via a certain direction, which is attributed to the controllable receding of the three-phase contact line during the dewetting process by the multiple parallel freshly emergent hairs. The as-prepared polymer thin films exhibit over six times higher charge-carrier mobility compared to the spin-coated films, which therefore provides a general approach for high-performance organic thin-film transistors.