A Density Functional Study of Furofuran Polymers as Potential Materials for Polymer Solar Cells

The structural, electronic, and optical properties of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) have been comprehensively studied by density functional theory (DFT) to rationalize the experimentally observed properties. Rather, we employed periodic boundary conditions (PBC) method to simulate the polymer block, and calculated effective charge mass from the band structure calculation for describing charge transport properties. The simulated results of P3HT are consistent with the experimental results in band gaps, absorption spectra, and effective charge mass. Based on the same calculated methods as P3HT, a series of polymers have been designed on the basis of the two types of building blocks, furofurans and furofurans substituted with cyano (CN) groups, to investigate suitable polymers toward polymer solar cell (PS C) materials. The calculated results reveal that the polymers substituted with CN groups have good structural stability, low-lying FMO energy levels, wide absorption spectra, and smaller effective masses, which are due to their good rigidity and conjugation in comparison with P3HT. Besides, the insertion of CN groups improves the performance of PSC. Synthetically, the designed polymers PFF1 and PFF2 are the champion candidates toward PSC relative to P3HT.