Porphyrin and phthalocyanine heavy metal removal: overview of theoretical investigation for heterojunction organic solar cell applications

ContextHeavy metals are highly noxious, and their presence can cause diverse effects on living organisms and the environment. Crown ether porphyrins and phthalocyanines are known to effectively extract these pollutants and are also used in photovoltaic devices. This study aims to evaluate various factors that govern intramolecular charge transfer (ICT) and photo-injection processes, including maximum absorption wavelength (& lambda;(max)), density of states (DOS), charge transfer dipole (& mu;(CT)), light harvesting efficiency (LHE), open-circuit voltage (V-oc), and free energy change of electron injection (& UDelta;G(inj)) in order to investigate the performance of different compounds designed from metalloporphyrins for bulk-heterojunction organic solar cell (BHJ-OSC) applications. The porphyrin complex showed the best optoelectronic properties, with remarkable LHE values and CT amounts compared to phthalocyanine derivatives. The central metal played a significant role in optimizing the optical properties of the materials for use in solar cells. HgPr4O and CdPr4O were found to have optimal V-oc values, resulting in effective injection, high electron, and hole mobilities, making them ideal materials for highly efficient BHJ-OSC devices.MethodsDensity functional theory (DFT) approach was employed with the B3LYP functional and the def2TZVP basis set as implemented in the Gaussian 16 revision C.01 program to investigate the designed complexes and to compute geometrical parameters, frontier molecular orbitals (FMOs), and natural bond orbital (NBO). Furthermore, the time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) method was used to analyze the optical properties and photovoltaic characteristics of selected metalloporphyrins by examining the UV-Vis spectra. In summary, the study presents a thorough description of the structural and electronic properties of the investigated complexes and provides insights into their potential use in photovoltaic applications.