Dr. Insook Lee

LG: South Korea

"Simulation Studies on AC-PDP Cells"

The color ac plasma display panel (AC-PDP) is one of the most promising technologies for large-area flat panel displays. Research and development activities on PDPs in the past several years have been carried out to improve PDP display performance characteristics such as brightness, luminous efficacy, resolution, lifetime and contrast ratio. However, more improvements are still needed; low luminous efficacy has been a major drawback of PDPs until now. The most essential enhancement that must be carried out if PDP televisions are to come into widespread use is to improve their luminous efficacy to achieve a bright picture with low power consumption. Some of the main factors that determine the luminous efficacy of PDPs are cell structure, gas composition, phosphor characteristics and driving scheme. For the optimization of these factors, a thorough understanding of the gas discharge phenomena is required. Therefore, discharge modeling and simulation become essential.

Simulation studies have been performed to understand the operation of surface discharge AC-PDPs and to optimize the operation conditions, employing the two- or three-dimensional fluid model. PDP simulations can predict discharge characteristics such as space charge and excited species distributions, electric potential, light output, luminous efficiency and current during the discharge as a function of time, gas composition, pressure, geometry, applied voltage, etc. Thus, these results are very useful to gain insight regarding the basic trends of discharge characteristics and provide helpful guidance to the design of PDP cells, without having to invest in expensive experimental tests. In this talk, some of these results will be presented, which show that simulations can be an alternative tool searching for high efficiency AC-PDPs.