An Study of the Structure and Energetics of Hydrogen Bonding in Ionic Liquids.

Unlike typical hydrogen-bonded networks such as water, hydrogen bonded ionic liquids display some unusual characteristics due to the complex interplay of electrostatics, polarization, and dispersion forces in the bulk. Protic ionic liquids in particular contain close-to traditional linear hydrogen bonds that define their physicochemical properties. This work investigates whether hydrogen bonded ionic liquids (HBILs) can be differentiated from aprotic ionic liquids with no linear hydrogen bonds using state-of-the-art calculations.

Application of spin-ratio scaled MP2 for the prediction of intermolecular interactions in chemical systems.

Accurate prediction of intermolecular interactions plays a pivotal role in many areas of chemistry and biology including (but not limited to) the design of pharmaceuticals, solid electrolytes and food additives. Here we present the application of the recently developed spin-ratio scaled MP2 method (termed SRS-MP2) to six different datasets covering a wide range of interaction types from strong hydrogen bonding to van der Waals dispersion and π-π stacking. The method achieves a remarkably low mean absolute error of 1.

Quantum Chemical Methods for the Prediction of Energetic, Physical, and Spectroscopic Properties of Ionic Liquids.

The accurate prediction of physicochemical properties of condensed systems is a longstanding goal of theoretical (quantum) chemistry. Ionic liquids comprising entirely of ions provide a unique challenge in this respect due to the diverse chemical nature of available ions and the complex interplay of intermolecular interactions among them, thus resulting in the wide variability of physicochemical properties, such as thermodynamic, transport, and spectroscopic properties. It is well understood that intermolecular forces are directly linked to physicochemical properties of condensed systems, and therefore, an understanding of this relationship would greatly aid in the design and synthesis of functionalized materials with tailored properties for an application at hand.

Comparison of the Effective Fragment Potential Method with Symmetry-Adapted Perturbation Theory in the Calculation of Intermolecular Energies for Ionic Liquids.

The effective fragment potential (EFP) method that decomposes the interaction energy as a sum of the five fundamental forces-electrostatic, exchange-repulsion, polarization, dispersion, and charge transfer-was applied to a large test set of ionic liquid ion pairs and compared against the state-of-the-art method, Symmetry-Adapted Perturbation Theory (SAPT). The ion pairs include imidazolium and pyrrolidinium cations combined with anions that are routinely used in the field of ionic liquids. The aug-cc-pVDZ, aug-cc-pVTZ, and 6-311++G(d,p) basis sets were used for EFP, while SAPT2+3/aug-cc-pVDZ provided the benchmark energies.