DFT and TD-DFT calculations to estimate the photovoltaic parameters of some metal-free dyes based on triphenylamine: the influence of inserting an auxiliary electron-withdrawing group on DSSC's performance

Abstract

Using density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT), the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of a series of novel designed D-π-Aa-A metal-free dyes with different auxiliary electron-withdrawing groups is predicted and discussed. The effect of incorporating an auxiliary electron-withdrawing group (Ap) between the π-bridge and anchoring group (A) on the photovoltaic properties is investigated and discussed. The key optoelectronic parameters that can be used for estimating PCE of the investigated dyes in DSSCs like FMOs and gap energies, light harvesting efficiency (LHE), the energy of the conduction band of the adsorbed dye cluster, electron, hole, and total reorganization energies, driving energy of electron injection and regeneration, natural bond orbital charge (NBO), dipole moment, and the chemical reactive parameters are determined and discussed. The predicted PCE of 7.15% shows a good agreement with the experimental results of 7.3%, confirming our methodology's credibility and validity. In addition, the predicted PCEs of our designed organic compounds are 8.52, 9.50, 10.77, 11.62, and 12.45%, indicating that the present work can provide new clues for synthesizing efficient organic compounds for DSSCs.