Driving issues of large area liquid crystal devices

The surface area of liquid crystal (LC) devices in different applications, such as displays, signage devices and smart windows is becoming larger and larger. The electrical driving of such devices does not pose many problems when working on centimetre sized devices. Different types of driving issues arise when up-scaling such devices to areas of several square metre, due to the fact that the thin-film transparent conductors used in these devices exhibit a finite sheet conductivity. One of the resulting issues is the non-uniformity of the electric field across the area of the device and the resulting non-uniform optical behaviour. In this work, we present a simulation model that is able to predict the optical and electrical behaviour of large-sized liquid crystal devices with different applied voltage signals, including the power consumption. The simulation results are compared with optical and electrical measurements on a liquid crystal device of 1.5 m by 1.2 m.