A ReaxFF force field for sodium intrusion in graphitic cathodes.

Sodium intercalation and adsorption on graphitic carbon plays an important role in cathode wear during aluminium electrolysis and is relevant for sodium ion battery (NIB) applications. We present a parameter set for the ReaxFF formalism trained to describe sodium interactions with graphitic carbon. The force field developed reproduce the training data with reasonable accuracy and displays qualitatively adequate predictive power. The force field is applied in hybrid grand canonical Monte Carlo-molecular dynamics (GC-MC/MD) simulations of model systems representative of sodium intrusion in graphitic carbon cathodes used in aluminium electrolysis.

Potential Energy Surfaces and Charge Transfer of PAH-Sodium-PAH Complexes.

To further understanding of the role of sodium in carbon cathode degradation in Hall-Héroult cells, potential-energy surfaces and charge-transfer curves are presented for finite-size complexes of sodium intercalated between various polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Calculations for lithium and potassium are included to highlight the disparate intercalation behaviour of the alkali metals in graphite intercalation compounds. Static energy barriers from DFT are used to compute macroscopic diffusion coefficients according to transition-state theory. Comparing the calculated diffusion coefficient to experimental values from the literature sheds light on the role of lattice diffusion of sodium-graphite intercalation compounds in sodium intrusion in graphitic carbon cathodes.

Chemically accurate energy barriers of small gas molecules moving through hexagonal water rings.

We present chemically accurate potential energy curves of CH4, CO2 and H2 moving through hexagonal water rings, calculated by CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVTZ with counterpoise correction. The barriers are extracted from a potential energy surface obtained by allowing the water ring to expand while the gas molecule diffuses through. State-of-the-art XC-functionals are evaluated against the CCSD(T) potential energy surface.

The Dalton quantum chemistry program system.

Dalton is a powerful general-purpose program system for the study of molecular electronic structure at the Hartree-Fock, Kohn-Sham, multiconfigurational self-consistent-field, Møller-Plesset, configuration-interaction, and coupled-cluster levels of theory. Apart from the total energy, a wide variety of molecular properties may be calculated using these electronic-structure models. Molecular gradients and Hessians are available for geometry optimizations, molecular dynamics, and vibrational studies, whereas magnetic resonance and optical activity can be studied in a gauge-origin-invariant manner. Frequency-dependent molecular properties can be calculated using linear, quadratic, and cubic response theory. A large number of singlet and triplet perturbation operators are available for the study of one-, two-, and three-photon processes. Environmental effects may be included using various dielectric-medium and quantum-mechanics/molecular-mechanics models. Large molecules may be studied using linear-scaling and massively parallel algorithms. Dalton is distributed at no cost from http://www.daltonprogram.org for a number of UNIX platforms.