A high throughput virtual screening approach for identifying new thermally activated delayed fluorescence-based emitters

Thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) offers the promise of highly efficient organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), without the heavy metals requirement of the previous generation of OLEDs. However, the design of new TADF emitters is complicated by competing requirements, which require opposing design strategies. High throughput virtual screening (HTVS) approaches, however, offer the possibility of identifying new TADF emitters without necessarily relying on existing design rules. In this work the STONED algorithm [A. Nigam, R. Pollice, M. Krenn, G. D. P. Gomes and A. Aspuru-Guzik, Chem. Sci., 2021, 12, 7079] is used to impose random structural mutations starting from a set of twenty parent molecules, composed of both traditional donor–acceptor and multiresonant TADF emitters. Following this, successive filters are applied based on features of the atomic structure through to time-dependent density functional theory calculations. Although the randomised approach proves to be ill-suited to rediscovering existing TADF emitters, the resulting workflow leads to the identification of a number of molecules with promising properties for TADF, across a range of emission colours.