Density Functional Methods for Fast Screening of Metal–Organic Frameworks for Hydrogen Storage

Abstract

Classical density functional theory (DFT) has been routinely used for the characterization of pore size distribution and specific surface area of porous materials by gas physisorption. However, its application to large-scale screening of materials for gas storage has been largely unexplored because it is commonly believed that the DFT calculations are applicable only to one-dimensional systems and highly sensitive to the approximations introduced in the free-energy functionals. In this work, we have investigated four representative versions of nonlocal density functionals for predicting H2 adsorption using both the slit pore model and a large library of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) under a broad range of temperatures and pressures. The four versions of DFT share a common functional from the modified fundamental measure theory to account for the molecular excluded volume effects while differing in their approximations to represent the intermolecular attractions, viz., mean-field approximation, two versi...