Paul Winget

Computational electrochemistry: aqueous one-electron oxidation potentials for substituted anilines

Semiempirical molecular orbital theory and density functional theory are used to compute one-electron oxidation potentials for aniline and a set of 21 mono- and di-substituted anilines in aqueous solution. Linear relationships between theoretical predictions and experiment are constructed and provide mean unsigned errors as low as 0.02 V over a training set of 13 anilines; the error rises to 0.09 V over a test set of eight additional anilines. A good correlation is also found between oxidation potential and a simple computed property, namely the energy of the highest occupied molecular orbital for neutral anilines in aqueous solution. For the particular case of the substituted anilines, a strong correlation between oxidation potential and pKa is found, and a still stronger correlation between oxidation potential and physical organic descriptors for aromatic substituents is also found, albeit over a reduced data set.

Universal Solvation Model Based on Conductor-Like Screening Model

Atomic surface tensions are parameterized for use with solvation models in which the electrostatic part of the calculation is based on the conductor‐like screening model (COSMO) and the semiempirical molecular orbital methods AM1, PM3, and MNDO/d. The convergence of the calculated polarization free energies with respect to the numerical parameters of the electrostatic calculations is first examined. The accuracy and precision of the calculated values are improved significantly by adjusting two parameters that control the segmentation of the solvent‐accessible surface that is used for the calculations. The accuracy of COSMO calculations is further improved by adopting an optimized set of empirical electrostatic atomic radii. Finally, the electrostatic calculation is combined with SM5‐type atomic surface tension functionals that are used to compute the nonelectrostatic portions of the solvation free energy. All parameterizations are carried out using rigid (R) gas‐phase geometries; this combination (SM5‐type surface tensions, COSMO electrostatics, and rigid geometries) is called SM5CR. Six air–water and 76 water–solvent partition coefficients are added to the training set of air–solvent data points previously used to parameterize the SM5 suite of solvation models, thereby bringing the total number of data points in the training set to 2266. The model yields free energies of solvation and transfer with mean unsigned errors of 0.63, 0.59, and 0.61 kcal/mol for AM1, PM3, and MNDO/d, respectively, over all 2217 data points for neutral solutes in the training set and mean unsigned errors of 3.0, 2.7, and 3.1 kcal/mol, respectively, for 49 data points for the ions.