Environmentally compatible 3-dimensional star-shaped donor materials for efficient organic solar cells

摘要

Small molecule (SM)-based star-shaped materials are getting tremendous attention to be employed as hole transport materials for organic/perovskite solar cells (OSCs) due to their tunable energy levels, intense absorption ability, and their three-dimensional (3D) charge transport properties. Herein, four-armed SM donors (BD1-BD10) with benzodithiophene (BDT) as the central-core unit have been efficiently designed and then characterized theoretically to investigate their optical and optoelectronic behavior. These four-armed designed star-shaped (BD1-BD10) materials exhibited deeper HOMO levels and higher extinction coefficients, which tend to offer better phase separation morphology during blend formation. These molecules (BD1-BD10) and reference (R) have been fully characterized theoretically with advanced quantum chemical approaches. The photophysical and optoelectronic characteristics have been investigated with density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent (TD-DFT) calculations. The alignment of frontier molecular orbitals (FMOs), optical characteristics, open-circuit voltages, the density of states (DOS), transition density matrix (TDM), and reorganization energies of holes and electrons in these materials have been investigated. BD3 shows the highest absorption (λ_(max)) of 571.33 nm, with an optical bandgap at 3.30 eV, respectively. Moreover, a complex study of BD3/PC61BM unveiled the process of remarkable charge shifting at the donor-acceptor interface. Therefore, our proposed strategy is a prerequisite for designing desirable photovoltaic molecules for efficient organic/perovskite SCs and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).