Toray Industries, Inc. (head office: Chuo-ku, Tokyo; President: Akihiro Nikkaku; hereinafter referred to as “Toray”) announced today that it developed an innovative UV blocking film that is thinner than conventional UV blocking films and blocks up to 99.99% of UV rays. It is transparent and blocks ultraviolet rays up to around 400 nm. The company is working in earnest towards starting mass production in 2020.
With the information society making remarkable advances in recent years, various displays have been developed, besides conventional LCDs, and products leveraging various characteristics have been introduced in the market. Among them, the use of organic EL displays has been rapidly spreading in many applications such as TV sets and smartphones. However, such displays have been found to be susceptible to water, heat and ultraviolet rays, with UV in the 400 nm range, close to visible light, especially damaging to the screens as per some reports, calling for further improvements.
Meanwhile, Toray has been working on the technology it had developed for its nano-lamination film PICASUS®, which it introduced to the market in 2008, pursuing it to its limit. As a result, the Company is now able to control the layer thickness of the nano-laminated film even more accurately and have achieved wavelength-selectivity, which enables it to freely control the reflective wavelength band using interference reflection phenomenon. The Company has introduced PICASUS® series products with added characteristics required for various applications such as near-infrared transmitting metallic luster tone film, dichroic tone film and blue-light blocking film.
The innovative UV blocking film PICASUS®UV being introduced is a laminated film of several hundreds to thousands of nano-scale layers and can reflect and absorb light in the ultraviolet range because of the thickness of the layers and the layout design. Using this function, Toray succeeded in drastically improving the shielding property of the film while sharply blocking UV in the 400 nm range, which is not attainable by conventional films using ultraviolet absorbers alone.
The innovative UV blocking film PICASUS®UV is expected to be used not only for display applications but also for various other applications in special packaging in fields including automobile, building & construction materials, agriculture, electronic materials and pharmaceuticals.
By skillfully leveraging its core technologies of organic synthetic chemistry, polymer chemistry, biotechnology and nanotechnology, Toray will continue to promote research and technological development of innovative materials that have the ability to essentially change the society to realize its corporate philosophy of “Contributing to society through the creation of new value with innovative ideas, technologies and products.”
Key technological points of the innovative UV blocking film PICASUS®UV are described below.
1. High UV shielding property
The interference reflection unique to nano-laminated film helps in sharply blocking up to UV ray in the 400 nm range, while the combined use of ultraviolet absorber generates specific synergy effects, resulting in a thin and transparent film with UV shielding rate of 99.99%, which cannot be achieved by conventional technology.
2. Highly accurate film lamination technology
Toray’s nano-multilayer technology enables to individually design the thickness of hundreds of layers by accurately controlling the thickness of each layer with its unique lamination device and polymer rheology control. This enables wavelength-selectivity to control the wavelength bands of reflection and transmission caused by optical interference reflection.
