Photovoltaphores: pharmacophore models for identifying metal-free dyes for dye-sensitized solar cells

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are cost-effective, sustainable, and versatile electricity producers, allowing them to be incorporated into a variety of devices. In this work, we explore the usage of pharmacophore modeling to identify metal-free dyes for DSSCs by means of virtual screening. Pharmacophore models were built based on experimentally tested sensitizers. Virtual screening was performed against a large dataset of commercially available compounds taken from the ZINC15 library and identified multiple virtual hits. A subset of these hits was subjected to DFT and time-dependent-DFT calculations leading to the identification of two compounds, TSC6 and ASC5, with appropriate molecular orbitals energies, favorable localization, and reasonable absorption UV–vis spectra. These results suggest that pharmacophore models, traditionally used in drug discovery and lead optimization, successfully predicted electronic properties, which are in agreement with the theoretical requirements for sensitizers. Such models may therefore find additional usages as modeling tools in materials sciences.