Designing of benzothiazole based non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) molecules for highly efficient organic solar cells

[Display omitted] •Five non-fullerene organic molecules are designed from the BTP-Cl molecule.•The newly designed molecules have better photovoltaic parameters (such as charge mobility) due to the introduction of highly efficient acceptor moieties.•The entitled molecules exhibited better absorption coefficient in chloroform solvent as compared to the previously reported BTP-Cl molecule.•Efficient acceptor groups decreases about 10 times the band gap energy as compared to chlorine-based BTP-Cl molecule. To enhance the efficiency of organic solar cells (OSCs), five non-fullerene π-conjugated acceptor molecules namely BTM1, BTM2, BTM3, BTM4 and BTM5 are designed from recently reported 16.5% efficient acceptor molecule BTP-Cl. The molecules in the present quantum chemical investigation consist of benzothiazole (BT) core with different chemical species on the terminal side. The optoelectronic study of BTM1-BTM5 reveals that BTM3 and BTM4 molecules are superior with respect to absorption range found at the wavelengths of 780 and 791 nm as compared to 746 nm of reference molecule BTP-Cl. Frontier molecular orbital (FMO) and transition density matrix (TDM) analysis are performed that give basic information about the distribution of charges among investigated molecules. All investigated molecules exhibit charge density spread over the entire molecules. The BTM4 and BTM5 molecules efficiently transfer their electron densities from highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) to lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) with narrow bandgaps of 1.86 eV and 2.14 eV respectively. The electron mobility for BTM3 (0.00527), BTM4 (0.005820) and BTM5 (0.00539) are found less than BTP-Cl (0.00643). Similarly, BTM5 gives the least value of hole mobility (0.00558) as compared to BTP-Cl (0.00803). The binding energies of these molecules are also observed less (0.28 eV, 0.29 eV and 0.33 eV for BTM3, BTM4 and BTM5) in gas phase than BTP-Cl (0.35 eV). Also, BTM5 is tested with donor polymer PTB7-Th that provides further evidence for their interactions. It turned out that the structural tailoring at terminals can tune effectively the frontier molecular orbital energy levels, band gap, absorption spectra, open-circuit voltage, reorganization energy and binding energy value in investigated molecules. Our results suggest that the investigated molecules can serve as fine acceptor materials. Additionally, some investigated molecules can also be used as a hole and/or electron transport mate