Low voltage blue-phase liquid crystal display with insulating protrusion sandwiched between dual-layer electrodes

ABSTRACT

In order to lower the operating voltage of blue-phase liquid crystal display (BPLCD), a BPLCD with insulating protrusion, which is sandwiched between dual-layer electrodes, is proposed. There are four electrodes in this structure; thus, we investigate different driving methods to find a proper driving method. The effect of protrusion’s dielectric constant on operating voltage of the proposed BPLCD is explored under various electrodes’ parameters. As a result, the operating voltage of the proposed BPLCD with protrusion’s dielectric constant of 1,000 is 9.8 V, which is reduced by ~ 4.67× compared with that of conventional in-plane switching (IPS) BPLCD (45.8 V). Moreover, the zigzag electrode structure is adopted to reduce the large off-axis image distortion index. Besides, the azimuth distortion index is defined to describe the gamma shift between the minimum and maximum gamma shift curves at a certain polar angle. The results show that the off-axis image distortion index can be reduced to 0.0834, the azimuth distortion index is 0.0810 and the viewing cone of contrast ratio larger than 1,000:1 is over 50ºas the zigzag proposed BPLCD is used.

Graphical Abstract

KEYWORDS:

• Blue phase liquid crystal display
• operating voltage
• dielectric constant
• gamma shift

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Haiwei Chen (Group of Prof. Shin-Tson Wu, University of Central Florida, USA) for the discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant Numbers 61475042, 11304074 and 11274088], the National Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province [Grant Numbers A2015202320 and GCC2014048] and Research Project of Hebei Education Department of China [Grant Number QN2015260].