Flexible organic/inorganic moisture barrier using plasma-polymerized layer

We report a multilayer moisture barrier structure comprised of alternating inorganic aluminum oxide and plasma-polymerized organic layers. The inorganic and organic layers were grown by atomic layer deposition (ALD) and plasma polymerization in vacuum, respectively. The inclusion of plasma-polymerized layers in the multilayer barrier structure enhanced the moisture barrier performance by around 15% for as-deposited samples. After being subjected to 10 000 bending cycles with a bending radius of 2 cm, however, the moisture barrier performance of the multilayer structure was improved by 50% from that of pure inorganic counterpart.