We recently introduced the CombiFF scheme [Oliveira et
al., J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2020, 16, 7525], an approach for the automated refinement of force-field
parameters against experimental condensed-phase data for large compound
families. Using this scheme, once the time-consuming task of target-data
selection and curation has been performed, the force-field optimization
itself is both straightforward and fast. As a result, CombiFF provides
an ideal framework for evaluating the influence of functional-form
decisions on the accuracy of a force field at an optimal level of
parametrization. We already used this approach to assess the effect
of using an all-atom representation compared to united-atom representations
in the force field [Oliveira et al., J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2022, 18, 6757]. Here, CombiFF is
applied to assess the effect of three Lennard-Jones combination rules,
geometric-mean (GM), Lorentz–Berthelot (LB), or Waldman–Hagler
(WH), on the simulated properties of organic liquids. The comparison
is performed in terms of the experimental liquid density ρliq, vaporization enthalpy ΔH
vap, surface-tension coefficient γ, static relative dielectric
permittivity ϵ, and self-diffusion coefficient D. The calibrations of the three force-field variants are carried
out independently against 2044 experimental values for ρliq, and ΔH
vap concerning
1516 compounds. The resulting root-mean-square deviations from experiment
are 30.0, 26.9, and 36.7 kg m–3 for ρliq and 2.8, 2.8, and 2.9 kJ mol–1 for ΔH
vap, when applying the GM, LB, and WH combination
rules, respectively. In terms of these (and the other) properties,
the three combination rules perform comparatively well, with the GM
and LB results being more similar to each other and slightly more
accurate compared to experiment. In contrast, the use of distinct
combination rules for the parameter calibration and property calculation
leads to much larger errors.