CCL:G: Adding many explicit water molecules to the model



In the past has been a lot of work exploring water clusters, with or without the solute, e.g. see book "Solvation Effects on Molecules and Biomolecules", ed. S. Canuto, Springer, 2008. It has many references you can follow. I am not doing research on the topic, so perhaps there are later examples.

Good luck,
Vis





On Tuesday, December 20, 2022 at 07:51:03 PM GMT, Grigoriy Zhurko reg_zhurko_-_chemcraftprog.com <owner-chemistry|*|ccl.net> wrote:


I need to compute the pKa values of some carbon acids and phenols, and it is a common practice to add 1-3 explicit water molecules, bonded with polar groups of the studied molecule, to better take into account the specific solvation effects (in addition to CPCM model). I tried to add many water molecules (14) for better results – see attached picture. The results are interesting. At one side, possibly very big error is produced by the existence of many local minimums with different numbers of h bonds. How these minimums should be named in paper – maybe “conformations”, “configurations”, “geometrical configurations”, “local minimums”?
Then I found, that if the computation of different acids is performed with same geometrical configurations of 5 h2o molecules bound to –COOH, and with same configurations for neutral molecule and anion, possibly the results are quite good (a common correlation can be obtained for carbon acids and phenols). So I want to publish these results; but I need to read more works when this approach (adding many explicit water molecules) was used. Can you suggest such papers?
By the way, using my program Chemcraft is important for such jobs, because the “Structures merger” utility in in allows one to transfer several H2O molecules in same configuration from one acid to another.
Grigoriy Zhurko
https://chemcraftprog.com

Attachment: manyexplh2omol.jpg
Description: JPEG image