Obtaining reasonable
geometric and electronic structures of excited
states is essential for accurately predicting the thermally activated
delayed fluorescence (TADF) for the application in organic light-emitting
diodes (OLEDs). Both electronic and geometric factors are evaluated
using density functionals for reproducing the vertical emission (E
VE(S1)) and singlet–triplet
splitting energies (ΔE
ST) of 28
typical TADF molecules. It is found that most TADF molecules (charge-transfer
type) can easily twist upon excitation, indicating the importance
of constructing a rigid molecular structure for improving the performance
of TADF OLEDs. Functionals with insufficient exact exchange will result
in the substantial underestimation of the relaxation energy of T1, suggesting that the hybrid functionals such as B3LYP should
not be used. Overall, the best approach for calculating E
VE(S1) and ΔE
ST is the descriptor-tuned LC-ωPBELOL functional combining
the CAM-B3LYP-optimized excited-state geometries, which shows mean
absolute deviations of 0.21 and 0.10 eV, respectively.