Evaluation of charge-transfer rates in fullerene-based donor-acceptor dyads with different density functional approximations

The shift towards renewable energy is one of the main challenges of this generation. Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC), based on donor-acceptor architectures, can help on this transition as they present excellent photovoltaic efficiencies yet cheap and simple manufacturing. For molecular heterojunct...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Besalú Sala, Pau, Voityuk, Alexander A., Luis Luis, Josep Maria, Solà i Puig, Miquel
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10256/19322
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10256/19322
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Energies renovables
Teoria del funcional de densitat
Transferència de càrrega
Renewable energy sources
Density functionals
Charge transfer
Descripción
Sumario:The shift towards renewable energy is one of the main challenges of this generation. Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC), based on donor-acceptor architectures, can help on this transition as they present excellent photovoltaic efficiencies yet cheap and simple manufacturing. For molecular heterojunctions DSSCs, donor-acceptor pairs are linked in a covalent manner, which facilitates their tailoring and rational design. Nevertheless, reliable computational characterization of charge transfer rate constants (kCT) is needed to speed this development process up. In this context, the performance of time-dependent density functional theory for the calculation of kCT's in donor-acceptor fullerene-based dyads has not been benchmarked yet. Herein, we present a detailed analysis on the performance of seven well-known density functional approximations (DFAs) for this type of systems, focusing on several parameters as the reorganization energies (λ), electronic couplings (VDA), and Gibbs energies (ΔG^0_CT), as well as in the final rate constants. The amount of exact exchange at short range (SR) and long range (LR) electron-electron distances (and the transition from SR to LR) turned out to be key for the success of the prediction. The tuning of these parameters improves significantly the performance of current DFAs