They discover a system that could allow us to print our own OLED screens at home

While OLED panels are becoming the reference technology in salons around the world, a team of engineers has succeeded in printing a screen on a 3D printer.

If we look to the future, it may not be long before we will be able to print our own television at home. But since that seems a bit hasty that first, we go piecemeal in this breakthrough.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have developed what they say is the world’s first fully 3D printed flexible OLED display. In theory, this could prevent us from depending on factory-made panels to build or repair your appliances.

The new approach combines two 3D printing methods to print the six layers necessary for a functional display. The team used extrusion printing to make the electrodes, encapsulation, insulation and interconnects, while the active layers were spray painted at room temperature.

Previous attempts by various teams had problems with uniformity of light (consistency across the entire panel) or they turned to techniques beyond 3D printing to place some components, such as spin coating or thermal evaporation.

The prototype had alone 1.5 inches wide and used only 64 pixels so we are not talking about a truly practical panel, since much higher resolutions would be required (a Full HD screen requires more than 2 million pixels).

It may also take time to adapt the technology for home use, as the university used a custom 3D printer that costs the same as a Tesla Model S, so it may take some time for the method to be viable on retail printers.

However, the very nature of technology makes these goals relatively achievable and opens the door to many possibilities when home-printed OLED displays come in handy.

In addition to home repairs, this could help build homemade gadgets with custom displays. Somehow this invention could democratize technology, albeit at a high level.