Polarizabilities of Carbon Dioxide and Carbodiimide. Assessment of Theoretical Model Dependencies on Dipole Polarizabilities and Dipole Polarizability Anisotropies

Chemoinformatics-Driven Design of New Physical Solvents for Selective CO2 Absorption

The removal of CO₂ from gases is an important industrial process in the transition to a low-carbon economy. The use of selective physical (co-)solvents is especially perspective in cases when the amount of CO₂ is large as it enables one to lower the energy requirements for solvent regeneration. However, only a few physical solvents have found industrial application and the design of new ones can pave the way to more efficient gas treatment techniques. Experimental screening of gas solubility is a labor-intensive process, and solubility modeling is a viable strategy to reduce the number of solvents subject to experimental measurements. In this paper, a chemoinformatics-based modeling workflow was applied to build a predictive model for the solubility of CO₂ and four other industrially important gases (CO, CH₄, H₂, and N₂). A dataset containing solubilities of gases in 280 solvents was collected from literature sources and supplemented with the new data for six solvents measured in the present study. A modeling workflow based on the usage of several state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms was applied to establish quantitative structure-solubility relationships. The best models were used to perform virtual screening of the industrially produced chemicals. It enabled the identification of compounds with high predicted CO₂ solubility and selectivity toward other gases. The prediction for one of the compounds, 4-methylmorpholine, was confirmed experimentally.

Theoretical Study of Possible Reaction Mechanisms for the Formation of Carbodiimide in the Interstellar Medium (ISM) and Polarizabilities of Carbodiimide

The Structure of carbodiimide has been studied by using quantum chemical methods. Carbodiimide (HNCNH) has been detected towards Sagittarius B2 (N) in interstellar medium (ISM). Two reaction mechanisms have been proposed to study the formation of interstellar Carbodiimide. The first reaction mechanism is based on molecule-radical and the second one is a radical-radical mechanism, through previously detected interstellar molecules or radicals. Quantum chemical calculations have been performed by using density functional theory (DFT) and Moller-Plesset second order perturbation (MP2) theory, in gas phase as well as in polarizable continuum model (PCM). The proposed reaction paths are exothermic and barrierless which indicates the possibility of carbodiimide formation in ISM. Several basis sets have been used to verify the validity and accuracy of the results. The isotropic and anisotropic polarizabilities of carbodiimide have been calculated from relevant tensor components for both reaction mechanisms with the help of data obtained by DFT/B3LYP and MP2 methods using aug-cc-pVTZ basis sets in gaseous phase as well as in PCM.

Formation of large clusters of CO2 around anions: DFT study reveals cooperative CO2 adsorption

The cooperative O⋯C secondary interactions compensate for the diminishing effect of primary anion⋯C interactions in anionic clusters of CO₂ molecules.

Characterization of micro- and mesoporous materials using accelerated dynamics adsorption

Porosimetry is a fundamental characterization technique used in development of new porous materials for catalysis, membrane separation, and adsorptive gas storage. Conventional methods like nitrogen and argon adsorption at cryogenic temperatures suffer from slow adsorption dynamics especially for microporous materials. In addition, CO2, the other common probe, is only useful for micropore characterization unless being compressed to exceedingly high pressures to cover all required adsorption pressures. Here, we investigated the effect of adsorption temperature, pressure, and type of probe molecule on the adsorption dynamics. Methyl chloride (MeCl) was used as the probe molecule, and measurements were conducted near room temperature under nonisothermal condition and subatmospheric pressure. A pressure control algorithm was proposed to accelerate adsorption dynamics by manipulating the chemical potential of the gas. Collected adsorption data are transformed into pore size distribution profiles using the Horvath-Kavazoe (HK), Saito-Foley (SF), and modified Kelvin methods revised for MeCl. Our study shows that the proposed algorithm significantly speeds up the rate of data collection without compromising the accuracy of the measurements. On average, the adsorption rates on carbonaceous and aluminosilicate samples were accelerated by at least a factor of 4-5.