P-78: Electrophoretic Hybrid Particles Synthesis by Dispersion Polymerization in Organic Media: Towards Electrophoretic Display Applications

The effective sharing of information is a key parameter in our actual society. Electronic paper based on the controlled motion of electrophoretic particles appears thus promising since it combines the advantages of the usual paper (flexibility, reflective display) and the capacity to refresh information on the same support like the more common LCD or OLED technologies. Electrophoretic inks are composed of coloured charged particles which migrate under an electrical field between two electrodes. Depending of the position of the particles on the front plane, the colour on the screen can be tuned. The design of electrophoretic particles based on pigment or dyed polymer and their integration in electronic devices were successfully achieved during the last decade but are still limited to a two colour-electrophoretic system. Up to date the majority of these particles were synthesized in aqueous media and the electrophoretic mobility was achieved by a ionic stabilizer or by a polyelectrolyte surfactant. Moreover the final electrophoretic particles incorporated in the electronic devices have to be dispersed in an organic media (paraffin oil) in order to achieve the desired stability of the display and thus leads to a large variety of problems during the phase exchange process. In this work our goals were to rationalize and improve the ink synthesis as well as to design electrophoretic inks with the full colour panel in order to realize the next generation of electrophoretic displays. We performed the particle synthesis by using an organic dispersion technique in aliphatic hydrocarbon solvents leading to chargeable electrophoretic particles with a good size control over a large range (from 75nm to 20μm) and a good stability. In order to obtain the full color panel, the encapsulation of several inorganic pigments was achieved by using the same technique and the electrophoretic behaviour of the resulting inks was characterized in a cell specially designed for electrophoretic measurements in organic media.