Even three decades after signing
the Chemical Weapons Convention,
organophosphorus chemical warfare agents (CWAs), such as sarin, remain
a threat. The development of novel methods for the detection of CWAs,
protection from CWAs, and CWA decontamination motivates research on
their physicochemical properties. Due to the extreme toxicity of sarin,
most of the experimental studies are carried out using less toxic
simulant compounds. In addition to experimental studies of sarin simulants,
both sarin and simulants can be studied using in silico experimentsmolecular simulations. The results of classical
molecular modeling of the compounds and their agreement with experimental
data rely on the force field used to describe the system. In recent
years, there have been several force fields proposed for sarin and
its most common simulant dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP). However,
other simulants frequently used in experiments received less attention
from the molecular simulation perspective, for example, to date, there
is no force field and no simulation data for diisopropyl methylphosphonate
(DIMP). Here, we compare the literature force fields for sarin and
DMMP, focusing specifically on the vapor–liquid equilibrium
for the pure species. We carried out Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics
simulations using the existing literature force fields from which
we predicted the liquid densities and vapor pressures developing the
entire binodal curves. We compared the predictions to the experimental
data and showed that the TraPPE-UA force field outperformed the other
force fields. Thus, we extended TraPPE-UA for DIMP, utilized this
force field in molecular simulations, and predicted the liquid densities
and vapor pressures for a range of temperatures (binodal curve), which
agreed well with the published experimental data. From the binodal,
we calculated the critical properties of DIMP and demonstrated that
these parameters can be used in the Peng–Robinson equation
of state for this compound.