Highly Charge Transport Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence Host Materials Based on Benzimidazole-Acridine...

We designed novel thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) host molecules for blue electrophosphorescence by combining the electron acceptor benzimidazole (BI) unit and the electron donor acridine derivatives into a single molecular unit based on density functional theory (DFT). We obtained the energies of the first singlet (S₁) and the first triplet (T₁) excited states of the TADF materials by performing DFT and time-dependent DFT (TD-DFT) calculations to the ground state using dependence on charge transfer amounts for the optimal Hartree-Fock percentage in the exchange-correlation of TD-DFT. Using DFT and TD-DFT calculations, the large separation between the HOMO and LUMO caused a small difference in energy (ΔE_ST) between the S₁ and T₁ states. The host molecules retained high triplet energy and showed great potential for use in blue phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes. The results showed that these molecules are promising TADF host materials because they have a low barrier to hole and electron injection, balanced charge transport for both holes and electrons, and a small ΔE_ST.