Superacid-catalyzed Friedel–Crafts polyhydroxyalkylation: a straightforward method to construct sky-blue thermally activated delayed fluorescence polymers

Abstract

Despite the rapid development of thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) polymers for solution-processed electroluminescence devices, there still exists a great demand on the exploitation of efficient blue TADF polymers. Herein, we designed and synthesized a series of sky-blue TADF polymers via simple and metal-free superacid-catalyzed Friedel–Crafts polyhydroxyalkylation. All of these TADF polymers successfully inherited the features of TADF moieties embedded into the backbone. By utilizing these polymers as the emitting layers, solution-processed polymer light emitting diodes (PLEDs) achieved good performance with the maximum external quantum efficiency of 5.4%.