A novel technique of fabrication of nanoparticle acrylate doped polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) film

Abstract

In order to investigate the electro-optical characteristics of the current polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) film, zinc acrylate nanoparticles (N_Ps) were doped into the PDLC prepared samples. Generally for the fabrication of N_Ps–based PDLC film, two conventional methods such as the sandwich method and capillary methods are considered. In the conventional fabrication method of N_p-doped PDLCs, the homogenous distribution of nanoparticles remained an unresolved issue. Particularly, upon the fabrication of N_p-doped PDLC films, it is important to emphasis that nanoparticles are uniformly distributed inside the indium tin oxide (ITO) coated glass. For the purpose, here in this work, a new PDLC manufacturing method has been proposed to improve such shortcoming. Unlike the conventional method, the N_Ps acrylate layer was first coated on the ITO glass, which maintained evenly distributed N_Ps and then was placed onto the polymer/LC crystal mixture. By adopting the current PDLC fabricated method (with 1.0 wt% ZnA layer coating into PDLC film) the transmittance remained 93.9% and a good contrast ratio (CR) ∼ 7.0 was observed at a low driving voltage (∼ 20 V). Moreover the morphology study of current PDLCs showed a uniform size distribution of droplet morphology as well as a homogeneous distribution of N_Ps. Thus our investigations indicated that PDLC films prepared by this new technique achieved the goal of uniform distribution of N_Ps particles, homogeneous distribution of droplet morphology with the improved electro-optical characteristics.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

Keywords:

• Polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC)
• nanoparticles (NPs)
• electro-optical property
• contrast ratio (CR)