Molecular designing of naphthalene diimide based fullerene-free small organic solar cell - Acceptors with high photovoltaic performance by density functional theory.

Abstract

With the help of computational chemistry tools, three non-fullerene acceptors, which are 2-methylene-malononitrile (M-1), 2-(3-methyl-5-methylene-2-thioxothiazolidin-4-ylidene) malononitrile (M-2) and 1-methyl-5-methylene-2,6-dioxo-1,2,5,6-tetrahydropyridine-3-carbonitrile (M-3), are designed with naphthalene diimide (NDI) central unit. Their different photovoltaic and optoelectronic properties like absorption spectrum, electrons density, solubility strength, reorganization energies, % ETC from donor to acceptor part, excitation energies, oscillating strength, morphology and crystallinity of device for constructing the thin film bulk hetro junction devices were computed at the WB97XD/6-31 G (d, p) level of density functional theory (DFT). Expected open circuit voltages of designed molecules are high as 4.05 eV to 4.49 eV, which are significantly larger than that of the previously reported 3-methyl-5-methylene-2-thioxothiazolidin-4-one (R) with the value of 3.60 eV at the zero current level. Charge carrier mobilities of designed molecules are high due to having low re-organization energies varying from 0.0163 eV to 0.0280 eV for electron and 0.0160 eV to 0.0190 eV for hole, strong absorption properties between the 420 nm to 550 nm in chloroform and 400 nm to 540 nm in gas phase conditions, respectively.