Cost-Effective Quantum Mechanical Approach for Predicting Thermodynamic and Mechanical Stability of Pure-Silica Zeolites

Several computational techniques for solid-state applications have recently been proposed to enlarge the scope of computer simulations of large molecular systems. In this contribution, we focused on two of these, namely, HF-3c and PBEh-3c. They were recently proposed by the Grimme's group, as low-cost ab initio-based techniques for electronic structure calculation of large systems and were proved to be effective essentially for organic molecules. HF-3c is based on a Hartree-Fock Hamiltonian with a minimal Gaussian quality basis set, whereas PBEh-3c is a density functional theory (DFT) based method with a hybrid functional and a medium-quality basis set. Both HF-3c and PBEh-3c account for dispersion (London) interactions and are free from the basis set superposition error due to limited basis set size, through several pairwise semiempirical corrections. To the best of our knowledge, despite the promising results on the cost-accuracy side of molecular simulations of organic molecules, these methods have been used only in few cases for solid-state applications. In this contribution, we studied the performance of HF-3c and PBEh-3c for predicting the properties of inorganic crystals to enlarge the applicability of these cheap and fast methodologies. As a testing ground, we have chosen a well-known class of material, e.g., microporous all-silica zeolites. We benchmarked geometries, formation energies, vibrational features, and mechanical properties by comparing the results with literature data from both experiment and computer simulation. For structures, HF-3c is extremely accurate in predicting the zeolites cell volume, albeit we do not include any vibrational contribution, neither zero point nor thermal, on the computed volumes, which may introduce small variations in the predicted values. For the energetic, the relative stability of the zeolites using the DFT//HF-3c approach allows predictions within the experimental error for most of the cases taken into consideration when the experimental enthalpies were corrected back to electronic energies by using the HF-3c thermodynamic contributions computed in the harmonic approximation. This strategy is particularly convenient, as the slow step (geometry optimization) is carried out with the cheapest HF-3c method, whereas the fast step (single point energy evaluation) is carried out with costly DFT methods. In this sense, the use of the DFT//HF-3c approach results to be a promising one to predict the stability and structure of microporous materials. Finally, the HF-3c method predicts the mechanical properties of the zeolite set in reasonable agreement with respect to those computed with the state-of-the-art DFT simulations, indicating the HF-3c method as a possible technique for the mechanical stability screenings of microporous materials.