Designing of 5,10-Dihydroindolo [3,2-b] Indole (DINI) Based Donor Materials for Small Molecule Organic Solar Cells

Abstract

In this paper, four small molecules B1, B2, B3 and B4 based on donor–acceptor–donor–acceptor–donor (D-A-D-A-D) combination were designed by making structural modifications in R. The designed molecules contain 5,10-dihydro-indolo [3,2-b] indole central donor core and different benzo-thiadiazole and fluorine substituted benzothiadiazole (FBT) acceptor units. These molecules have different subunits introduced on 5,10-dihydroindolo [3,2-b] indole central core like benzo [1,2,5] thiadiazole in (B1), 5-Fluoro-benzo [1,2,5] thiadiazole in (B2), 5-Methyl-benzo [1,2,5] thiadiazole in (B3), 2-Fluoro-2-methyl-2-H-benzotriazole unit in (B4), flanked with [2,2’,5’,2”] terthiophene as spacer (S) and triphenyl amine as a common end-capped donor in all the molecules (B1– B4). The optoelectronic properties of these molecules were studied by performing density functional theory (DFT) at CAM-B3LYP. Among all the designed structures, B2 showed maximum absorption (457[Formula: see text]nm) due to its strong electron withdrawing 5-Fluoro-benzo [1,2,5] thiadiazole acceptor unit. Other opto-electronic properties were analyzed through reorganization energies, density of electronic states and transition density matrix (TDM) to estimate the photovoltaic potential of these newly designed molecules. Low exciton binding energies and comparable values of open circuit voltage than R indicate the worth of these candidates to be used in future solar energy driven devices.