Interstellar dimethyl ether gas-phase formation: a quantum chemistry and kinetics study

Dimethyl ether is one of the most abundant interstellar complex organic molecules. Yet its formation route remains elusive. In this work, we have performed electronic structure and kinetics calculations to derive the rate coefficients for two ion-molecule reactions recently proposed as a gas-phase formation route of dimethyl ether in interstellar objects, namely CH$_3$OH + CH$_3$OH$_2^+$ $\rightarrow$ (CH$_3$)$_2$OH$^+$ + H$_2$O followed by (CH$_3$)$_2$OH$^+$ + NH$_3$ $\rightarrow$ CH$_3$OCH$_3$ + NH$_4^+$. A comparison with previous experimental rate coefficients for the reaction CH$_3$OH + CH$_3$OH$_2^+$ sustains the accuracy of the present calculations and allow a more reliable extrapolation at the low temperatures of interest in interstellar objects (10-100 K). The rate coefficient for the reaction (CH$_3$)$_2$OH$^+$ + NH$_3$ is, instead, provided for the first time ever. The rate coefficients derived in this work essentially confirm the prediction by Taquet et al. (2016) concerning dimethyl ether formation in hot cores/corinos. Nevertheless, this formation route cannot be efficient in cold objects (like prestellar cores) where dimethyl ether is also detected, because ammonia has a very low abundance in those environments

A High-Level Ab Initio Study of the N-2 + N-2 Reaction Channel

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A Novel Intermolecular Potential to Describe the Interaction Between the Azide Anion and Carbon Nanotubes

47 P.International audienceIn this contribution we propose a novel and accurate intermolecular potential that can be used for the simulation of the azide anion confined inside carbon nanotubes of arbitrary size. The peculiarity of our approach is to include an explicit term, modeling the induction attractive contributions from the negatively charged azide ion, that can be generalized to other ions confined in carbon nanotubes of different size and length. Through a series of accurate DLPNO-CCSD(T) calculations, we show that this potential reproduces the ab initio interaction energy to within a few kcal/mol. The potential is implemented in a molecular dynamics program, with which we carried out illustrative simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. At last, the guidelines provided by this investigation can be applied to build up force fields for many neutral/ionic molecular species confined within carbon nanotubes; a crucial requirement to carry out molecular dynamics simulations under a variety of conditions

Ion-water cluster molecular dynamics using a semiempirical intermolecular potential

Classical Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations have been performed to describe structural and dynamical properties of the water clusters forming around the Na + and K + . The dynamics of K + and Na + was investigated for small water clusters [K(H 2 O) n ] + and [Na(H 2 O) n ] + (n = 3 - 8), isolated in gas phase following the structure transformation through isomerizations between the accessible energy minima. The extent to which a classical molecular simulation accurately predicts properties depends on the quality of the force field used to model the interactions in the fluid. This has been explored by exploiting the flexibility of the Improved Lennard-Jones (ILJ) function in describing the long-range interaction of ionic water system

Adsorption of hydrogen molecules on carbon nanotubes using quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics

Physisorption and storage of molecular hydrogen on single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) of various diameters and chiralities are studied by means of classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and a force field validated using DFT-D2 and CCSD(T) calculations. A nonrigid carbon nanotube model is implemented with stretching (C−C) and valence angle potentials (C− C−C) formulated as Morse and Harmonic cosine potentials, respectively. Our results evidence that the standard Lennard-Jones potential fails to describe the H2−H2 binding energies. Therefore, our simulations make use of a potential that contains two-body term with parameters obtained from fitting CCSD(T)/CBS binding energies. From our MD simulations, we have analyzed the interaction energies, radial distribution functions, gravimetric densities (% wt), and the distances of the adsorbed H2 layers to the three zigzag type of nanotubes (5,0), (10,0), and (15,0) at 100 and 300 K

Distributed Gaussian orbitals for molecular calculations: application to simple systems

International audienc

Nitrogen gas on graphene: Pairwise interaction potentials

We investigate different types of potential parameters for the graphene-nitrogen interaction. Interaction energies calculated at DFT level are fitted with the semi-emperical Improved Lennard-Jones potential. Both a pseudo-atom potential and a full atomistic potential are considered. Furthermore, we consider the influence of the electrostatic part on the parameters using different charge schemes found in the literature as well as optimizing the charges ourselves. We have obtained parameters for both the nitrogen dimer and the graphene-nitrogen system. For the former, the four-charges Cracknell scheme reproduces with high precision the CCSD(T) interaction energy as well as the experimental diffusion coefficient in both the pseudo-atom and full atomstic potential. In the second case, the atom-atom model provides an average interaction energy of 2.3 kcal/mol, comparable with the experimental graphene- N2 interaction of 2.4 kcal/mol

An Experimental and Theoretical Investigation of 1-Butanol Pyrolysis

Bioalcohols are a promising family of biofuels. Among them, 1-butanol has a strong potential as a substitute for petrol. In this manuscript, we report on a theoretical and experimental characterization of 1-butanol thermal decomposition, a very important process in the 1-butanol combustion at high temperatures. Advantage has been taken of a flash pyrolysis experimental set-up with mass spectrometric detection, in which the brief residence time of the pyrolyzing mixture inside a short, resistively heated SiC tube allows the identification of the primary products of the decomposing species, limiting secondary processes. Dedicated electronic structure calculations of the relevant potential energy surface have also been performed and RRKM estimates of the rate coefficients and product branching ratios up to 2,000 K are provided. Both electronic structure and RRKM calculations are in line with previous determinations. According to the present study, the H2O elimination channel leading to 1-butene is more important than previously believed. In addition to that, we provide experimental evidence that butanal formation by H2 elimination is not a primary decomposition route. Finally, we have experimental evidence of a small yield of the CH3 elimination channel