An ab initio 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 ab initio calculations. This is achieved through geometry optimizations of a series of single ion pairs of HBILs in the gas phase and an implicit solvent. Using benchmark CCSD(T)/CBS calculations, the electrostatic and dispersion components of the interaction energy of these systems are compared with those of aprotic ionic liquids. The inclusion of the implicit solvent significantly influenced geometries of single ion pairs, with the gas phase shortening the hydrogen bond to reduce electrostatic interactions. HBILs were found to have stronger interactions by at least 10EtMeNH0 kJ mol-1 over aprotic ILs, clearly highlighting the electrostatic nature of hydrogen bonding. Geometric and energetic parameters were found to complement each other in determining the extent of hydrogen bonding present in these ionic liquids.

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 1.6 kJ mol-1 across all interaction types including semi-Coulombic systems such as organic ionic salts. The new SRS-MP2 method offers high level of accuracy for studying intermolecular interactions commonly found in molecular systems of chemical and biological relevance without the need for including additional terms in the formulation. This finding represents a new paradigm in the development of wavefunction-based methods for intermolecular interactions.

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. This review aims to give an overview of how electronic structure properties obtained from quantum chemical methods such as interaction/binding energy and its fundamental components, dipole moment, polarizability, and orbital energies, can help shed light on the energetic, physical, and spectroscopic properties of semi-Coulomb systems such as ionic liquids. Particular emphasis is given to the prediction of their thermodynamic, transport, spectroscopic, and solubilizing properties.

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. Differences between the two methods were found to be large, and strongly dependent on the anion type. For the aug-cc-pVTZ basis set, which produced the least errors, average relative errors were between 2.3% and 18.4% for pyrrolidinium ion pairs and between 2.1% and 27.7% for imidazolium ion pairs for each individual energetic component (excluding charge transfer), as well as the total interaction energy. Charge transfer gave the largest relative errors: 56% and 63% on average for pyrrolidinium- and imidazolium-based ion pairs, respectively. Scaling of the EFP components against SAPT2+3 showed improvement for polarization (induction) and dispersion terms, thus indicating potential for the development of cost-effective alternatives for intermolecular induction and dispersion potentials for ionic liquids.