Transferable Reactive Force Fields: Extensions of ReaxFF-lg to Nitromethane

JP Larentzos and BM Rice, JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY A, 121, 2001-2013 (2017).

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.6b11761

Transferable ReaxFF-lg models of nitromethane that predict a variety of material properties over a wide range of thermodynamic states are obtained by screening a library of similar to 6600 potentials that were previously optimized through the Multiple Objective Evolutionary Strategies (MOES) approach using a training set that included information for other energetic materials composed of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Models that best match experimental nitromethane lattice constants at 4.2 K and 1 atm are evaluated for transferability to high-pressure states at room temperature and are shown to better predict various liquid- and solid-phase structural, thermodynamic, and transport properties as compared to the existing ReaxFF and ReaxFF-lg parametrizations. Although demonstrated for an energetic material, the library of ReaxFF-lg models is supplied to the scientific community to enable new research explorations of complex reactive phenomena in a variety of materials research applications.

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