Patent Application
20200301192
The present disclosure relates to a liquid crystal display device, and more particularly to a flexible liquid crystal display device.
A flexible electronic device is a novel technology of manufacturing electronic components and elements on foldable (or bendable, stretchable or flexible) substrates. In comparison with a rigid electronic device, the flexible electronic device provides many advantages including small size, cost effectiveness, light weight, durability, flexibility and portability. This technology becomes more and more popular because of the potential uses in electronic applications, including flexible displays, flexible touch panels, wearable electronic devices, etc.
Currently, extensive studies have been conducted on the research and development of flexible displays. However, even so, there are still many technical defects to be overcome. For example, for the flexible displays, especially for flexible liquid crystal displays, after using a certain period of time, the side of the flexible substrate (such as a color filter substrate and/or a thin film transistor substrate) in the display may be peeled off from the cover layer (such as a glass cover). This defect not only may cause abnormal displaying images at the peripheral portion of the flexible display, but also may cause the flexible display to occur a large area of the abnormal displayed images because the irruption of external matters from the peeling regions, which reduces the reliability or lifetime of the flexible display.
Accordingly, it is necessary to provide an improved flexible liquid crystal display device to solve the problems encountered by current flexible liquid crystal display devices.
According to an embodiment, the present disclosure provides a flexible liquid crystal display device including a first flexible substrate, a second flexible substrate, a liquid crystal layer, a cover layer and a waterproof glue. The second flexible substrate is disposed opposite to the first flexible substrate, and the liquid crystal layer is disposed between the first flexible substrate and the second flexible substrate. The cover layer has a surface facing the second flexible substrate, and the waterproof glue is adhered to the surface of the cover layer and a side of the second flexible substrate.
According to the flexible liquid crystal display device of this embodiment in the present disclosure, since the waterproof glue is adhered to the surface of the cover layer and the side of the second flexible substrate, the probability of the second flexible substrate, especially the side thereof, peeling off from the surface of the cover layer may be reduced, and thus the reliability or lifetime of the flexible liquid crystal display device may be increased.
These and other objectives of the present disclosure will no doubt become obvious to those of ordinary skill in the art after reading the following detailed description of the embodiment that is illustrated in the various figures and drawings.
The present disclosure may be understood by reference to the following detailed description, taken in conjunction with the drawings as described below. It is noted that, for purposes of conciseness of the drawings and being easily understood by one skilled in the art, the components in the drawings may not be drawn to practical scale. In addition, the number and dimension of each component shown in drawings are only illustrative and are not intended to limit the scope of the present disclosure.
Certain terms are used throughout the description and following claims to refer to particular components. As one skilled in the art will understand, electronic equipment manufacturers may refer to a component by different names. This document does not intend to distinguish between components that differ in name but not function. The terms “include”, “comprise” and/or “have” used in the description of the present disclosure are open-ended terms, so it should be interpreted as the meaning of “including but not limited to . . . .”
When a component or a layer is referred to “disposed on another component or another layer” or “connected to another component or another layer”, it may represent that the component or the layer is directly disposed on another component or layer or directly connected to another component or layer, or other intermediate component or layer may exist between them. By comparison, when a component is referred to “directly disposed on another component or layer” or “directly connected to another component or another layer”, any intermediate component or layer does not exist between them.
The term “face” mentioned in the present disclosure refers to a component being close to another component, and the term “face away from” refers to a component being away from another component. The term “flexible device” means that the device can be bent, folded, curled, flexed or other similarly actuated along at least one bending axis, but not limited thereto. According to some embodiments, the device may also be respectively bent along more than two bending axes.
It should be noted that the technical features in different embodiments described in the following description can be replaced, recombined or mixed with one another to constitute another embodiment without departing from the spirit of the present disclosure.
Please refer to
An optical adhesive 118 is disposed between the second flexible substrate 114 and the cover layer 110, and fixed the second flexible substrate 114 and the cover layer 110. The waterproof glue 120 is adhered to a portion of the second surface 110a of the cover layer 110 and a side 114c of the second flexible substrate 114. In this embodiment, the waterproof glue 120 can be further adhered to a portion of a side 112c of the first flexible substrate 112. The adhesive material 122 is adhered to a portion of the second surface 110a of the cover layer 110 and a portion of the first flexible substrate 112. In this embodiment, the adhesive material 122 is not only adhered to the side 112c of the first flexible substrate 112 and the second surface 112a of the first flexible substrate 112, but also can be directly in contact with the waterproof glue 120. As a result, in addition to strengthening the integral firmness of the flexible liquid crystal display device 100, and the risk of the adhesive material 122 peeling from the first flexible substrate 112 may also be reduced.
According to this embodiment, the waterproof glue 120 is disposed between the adhesive material 122 and the first flexible substrate 112 and disposed between the adhesive material 122 and the second flexible substrate 114, and the waterproof glue 120 can attach to the first flexible substrate 112 and the second flexible substrate 114. According to the test results, disposing the waterproof glue 120, for example, to at least cover the side 114c of the second flexible substrate 114 may reduce the moisture to be absorbed by the edge portion of the second flexible substrate 114. Therefore, it can reduce the chance that the second flexible substrate 114 is peeling off from the cover layer 110. For example, when taking the bending axis FL shown in
The waterproof glue 120 may be materials having waterproof properties, such as silicone gel, polyurethane (PU), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polycarbonate (PC), polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), etc. The adhesive material 122 may be materials having higher adhesion such as polymer material having adhesion, and to make the waterproof glue 120 to more closely and firmly attach to the side 114c of the second flexible substrate 114, and reduce the waterproof glue 120 from peeling off from the side 114c of the second flexible substrate 114. The adhesion of the adhesive material 122 described above is the result of comparison with the adhesion of the optical adhesive 118, which means the adhesive material 122 has an adhesion better than the optical adhesive 118. In particular, in addition to fixing the second flexible substrate 114 and the cover layer 110, the optical adhesive 118 also need to have the function of light transmission, and by comparison, the adhesive material 122 is mainly used to strengthen the integral firmness of the flexible liquid crystal display device 100, so it has higher requirement for adhesion. In this embodiment, the waterproof glue 120 is fluid, so it can be coated by a nozzle and then placed stand to make the waterproof glue 120 dry and solidify. The adhesive material 122 is disposed in the form of a sheet. In other embodiments, the adhesive material 122 also can present as fluid glue, and be disposed through a coating method, but not limited thereto. Besides, according to an embodiment of the present disclosure, since the waterproof glue 120 and the adhesive material 122 may be located at the peripheral region 104 of the flexible liquid crystal display device 100 (as shown in
In addition, the main body of the cover layer 100 can be a cover glass, a protecting layer or a plastic substrate. The main body of the first flexible substrate 112 and the main body of the second flexible substrate 114 can be a plastic substrate respectively, and the water absorption rate of the first flexible substrate 112 and the second flexible substrate 114 may be higher than the water absorption rate of the cover layer 110. In regard to the condition that the water absorption rate of the first flexible substrate 112 and the water absorption rate of the second flexible substrate 114 is higher than the water absorption rate of the cover layer 110. The main body of the first flexible substrate 112 and/or the main body of the second flexible substrate 114 can be polyimide resin, polyester resin, polyethersulfone resin, cellulose resin, polyacrylate resin, polystyrene resin, polyolefin resin, polycarbonate resin and polysulfone resin, but not limited thereto. The main body of the cover layer 110 can be glass or the above described resin having lower water absorption rate than the first flexible substrate 112 and/or the second flexible substrate 114. In this embodiment, the polyimide resin is used mainly. It is noted that, the cover layer 110, the first flexible substrate 112 and the second flexible substrate 114 described above are rectangles for example, but not limited thereto, and they can also be presented in any other suitable shapes, such as triangles, rhombuses, trapezoids, wedges, other polygons or irregular shapes with arc edges.
Besides, the liquid crystal material in the liquid crystal layer 116 can be nematic liquid crystal, smectic liquid crystal, cholesteric liquid crystal, etc., but not limited thereto. In addition, the first flexible substrate 112 can include components or layers, such as switch elements (thin film transistors for example), a polarizer, conductive lines, etc. The second flexible substrate 114 can include components or layers, such as a color filter, a polarizer, a light shielding layer, conductive lines, etc., and they are not shown herein for conciseness.
The flexible liquid crystal display device is not limited to the above embodiments, and there may be different variation embodiments. For simplifying the description, the different variation embodiments in the following will use the same reference numerals as the first embodiment to symbol the same elements. In order to easily compare the differences between the first embodiment and the different variation embodiments, the following description will emphasize the differences of the different variation embodiments, and the repeated part will not be described redundantly.
The cover layer 110 can be exposed from an opening S of the outer frame 130, and the presented images of the display region 102 can be viewed from this opening S. The backlight device 132 is disposed between the outer frame 130 and the first flexible substrate 112 to provide the light required for presenting images. According to this embodiment, the waterproof glue 120 and the adhesive material 122 are not directly in contact with the outer frame 130 and the backlight device 132. However, the waterproof glue 120 or the adhesive material 122 can be directly in contact with the outer frame 130 or the backlight device 132 in other embodiments. In particular, a polarized light may be formed from the light produced by the backlight device 132 through the polarizer 1121 first, and the turning directions of the liquid crystal material 1161 at corresponding regions are controlled by the switch elements 1124 to rotate the polarization direction of partial of the polarized light, and the partial of the polarized light can sequentially pass through the components or layers such as the color filter 1144 and the polarizer 1141, and to present the images. It is noted that, a portion of the light shielding layer 1143 is disposed in the peripheral region 104 and disposed closely adjacent to the edge P1 of the display region 102, so an edge 1143S of the portion of the light shielding layer 1143 may be aligned with the edge P1 of the display region 102, or also be aligned with an edge 130S of the outer frame 130 simultaneously.
According to the flexible liquid crystal display device 100 disclosed by the embodiments described above, since the waterproof glue 120 may at least attach to the side 114c of the second flexible substrate 114, peeling off of the second flexible substrate 114, especially the side 114c of the second flexible substrate 114 from the surface of the cover layer 110 may be mitigated, and the reliability or lifetime of the flexible liquid crystal display device 100 may be increased.
Those skilled in the art will readily observe that numerous modifications and alterations of the device and method may be made while retaining the teachings of the disclosure. Accordingly, the above disclosure should be construed as limited only by the metes and bounds of the appended claims.
| Number | Date | Country | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 201910213457.3 | Mar 2019 | CN | national |
