Chemical bonds molecular system simulations

The semi-empirical bond polarization model is a powerful tool for the calculation of, 3C chemical shift tensors. For most molecules the errors of this model are in the same order of magnitude as the errors of ab initio methods, under the condition that the surrounding of the carbon is not too much deformed by small bond angles. A great advantage of the model is that bond polarization calculations are very fast. The chemical shift tensors of small molecules can be estimated in fractions of a second. There is also virtually no limit for the size of the molecule. Systems with a few thousand atoms can be calculated with a standard PC within a few minutes. Possible applications are repetitive calculations during molecular dynamics simulations for the interpretation of dynamic effects on 13C chemical shift distribution. 

In the early 1990s, Brenner and coworkers [163] developed interaction potentials for model explosives that include realistic chemical reaction steps (i.e., endothermic bond rupture and exothermic product formation) and many-body effects. This potential, called the Reactive Empirical Bond Order (REBO) potential, has been used in molecular dynamics simulations by numerous groups to explore atomic-level details of self-sustained reaction waves propagating through a crystal [163-171], The potential is based on ideas first proposed by Abell [172] and implemented for covalent solids by Tersoff [173]. It introduces many-body effects through modification of the pair-additive attractive term by an empirical bond-order function whose value is dependent on the local atomic environment. The form that has been used in the detonation simulations assumes that the total energy of a system of N atoms is ... 

Solvent effects can significantly influence the function and reactivity of organic molecules.1 Because of the complexity and size of the molecular system, it presents a great challenge in theoretical chemistry to accurately calculate the rates for complex reactions in solution. Although continuum solvation models that treat the solvent as a structureless medium with a characteristic dielectric constant have been successfully used for studying solvent effects,2,3 these methods do not provide detailed information on specific intermolecular interactions. An alternative approach is to use statistical mechanical Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulation to model solute-solvent interactions explicitly.4 8 In this article, we review a combined quantum mechanical and molecular mechanical (QM/MM) method that couples molecular orbital and valence bond theories, called the MOVB method, to determine the free energy reaction profiles, or potentials of mean force (PMF), for chemical reactions in solution. We apply the combined QM-MOVB/MM method to... 

In the vast majority of MD applications a further simplification is made by using effective pair-wise additive potentials for atomic interactions. In simulations which contain flexible molecules, it is common practice to add terms which represent chemical bonds, bond angles, improper torsions and dihedrals. Interactions between atoms of molecules are represented by effective pair-wise additive potentials. This empirical approach splits the total potential energy of the system into a bonded (inter-molecule) and non-bonded (intra-molecular) part. 

The use of molecular dynamics simulations for chemical reactions with low barriers has been so far limited to isomerization reactions. The most common system studied has been the trans-gauche isomerization of -butane. The potential energy for rotation about the central C—C bond in -butane is shown in Figure 3. The trans conformation is at a dihedral angle defined to be 0° while there are two equivalent, higher energy gauche conformations at... 

Summarizing, dynamical effects may be theoretically observed in such nanocomposites, despite the fact that these phenomena are impossible to understand from thermodynamic criteria, assuming chemical equilibrium. This section merely serves to emphasize that, clearly, such kinetic processes can only be properly dealt with if time plays an explicit role in the modelling of the system, to be accomplished by molecular-dynamics simulations. The reaction phenomenon found here appears to arise both from the drastic synthetic conditions as well as from the preference of nitrogen to be three-dimensionally bonded to the iron host. The numerical analysis of such dynamical processes will certainly gain importance in the coming years. 

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