A new strategy to develop force fields for molecular fluids is presented. The intermolecular parameters are fitted to reproduce experimental values of target properties at ambient conditions and also the critical temperature. The partial charges are chosen to match the dielectric constant. The Lennard-Jones parameters, εii and σii, are fitted to reproduce the surface tension at the vapor-liquid interface and the liquid density, respectively. The choice of those properties allows obtaining systematically the final parameters using a small number of simulations. It is shown that the use of surface tension as a target property is better than the choice of heat of vaporization. The method is applied to molecules, from all atoms to a coarse-grained level, such as pyridine, dichloromethane, methanol, and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (EMIM-BF4) at different temperatures and pressures. The heat of vaporization, radial distribution functions, and self-diffusion coeficient are also calculated.

Current force fields underestimate significantly the dielectric constant of formamide at standard conditions. We present a derivation of an accurate potential for formamide, which functional form builds on the OPLS/AA force field. Our procedure follows the approach introduced by Salas et al. (J. Chem. Theory and Comp., Just accepted, 2015), that can use information from ab initio calculations and molecular dynamics simulations. We consider several strategies to derive the atomic charges of formamide. We find that the inclusion of polarization effects in the quantum mechanical computations is essential to obtain reliable force fields. By varying the atomic charges and the LennardJones parameters describing the dispersion interactions in the OPLS/AA force field, we derive an optimum set of parameters to obtain accurate results for the dielectric constant, surface tension and bulk density of liquid formamide in a wide range of thermodynamic states. We test the transferability of our parameters to investigate liquid/liquid mixtures. We have chosen as case study an equimolar mixture of formamide and hexan-2-one. This mixture involves two fluids with very different polar characteristics, namely, large differences in their dielectric constants and their performance as polar solvents. The new potential highlights the importance of the correct parametrization of the pure liquid phases to investigate liquid mixtures. Finally, we examine the microscopic origin of the observed inmiscibility between formamide and hexa-2-one.

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Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to develop new parameters for acetamide using a systematic procedure proposed by Salas et al., where the atomic charges were fitted to reproduce the experimental dielectric constant and the Lennard-Jones parameters to match the surface tension and density. The parameters for formamide recently calculated by Pérez et al. were used to obtain the new parameters of acetamide where atoms of the amine group and carbon kept the same intermolecular parameter values in both molecules. The parameters of the methyl group, taken as united atom, and the oxygen atom were fitted to reproduce the dielectric constant, surface tension and density at 358.15 K. The new set of parameters, based on the optimised potential for liquids simulations with all atoms, was able to predict results of the target properties as a function of temperature as a pure component and the dielectric constant and density of binary mixtures with water and formamide as a function of acetamide concentration at 298.15 K. The polymer chains formed by hydrogen bond interactions were analysed to understand the maximum of dielectric constant in acetamide-water mixtures.

The transferable potential for a phase equilibria force field in its united-atom version, TraPPE_UA, is evaluated for 41 polar liquids that include alcohols, thiols, ethers, sulfides, aldehydes, ketones, and esters to determine its ability to reproduce experimental properties that were not included in the parametrization procedure. The intermolecular force field parameters for pure components were fit to reproduce experimental boiling temperature, vapor-liquid coexisting densities, and critical point (temperature, density, and pressure) using Monte Carlo simulations in different ensembles. The properties calculated in this work are liquid density, heat of vaporization, dielectric constant, surface tension, volumetric expansion coefficient, and isothermal compressibility. Molecular dynamics simulations were performed in the gas and liquid phases, and also at the liquid-vapor interface. We found that relative error between calculated and experimental data is 1.2% for density, 6% for heat of vaporization, and 6.2% for surface tension, in good agreement with the experimental data. The dielectric constant is systematically underestimated, and the relative error is 37%. Evaluating the performance of the force field to reproduce the volumetric expansion coefficient and isothermal compressibility requires more experimental data.