Formulating noncovalent interactions to predict structural transition in mixed guest hydrates

Abstract

AbstractThis work aims at formulating the noncovalent interactions of the mixed guest hydrate lattices of sI and sII structures. The reduced density plots obtained at the B3LYP level with 6‐31G(d) split valence set unveil the crucial contributions of hydrogen bonding, dispersion, van der Waals interaction, and steric effects toward lattice stability. These contributions are rather unreported in the hydrate phase equilibrium modeling. With this research gap, we attempt to formulate the natural regularity in the nonstoichiometric hydrates by the spherical harmonics shape descriptor. The van der Waals and hydrogen‐bond interactions are described with Kihara spherical cell potential and ab initio based calculations, respectively. Further, the ionization potential and polarizability of the guest molecule describe the dispersion interactions. Combining these contributions, we introduce a theoretical framework for the phase equilibrium modeling of mixed guest hydrates. This novel formulation offers various appealing advantages as: significantly reduced parametric structure, standardization of the parameter value for host–host pair, and generalized model framework. Despite of making the proposed theory so simple, it consistently outperforms the existing latest models, which employ various state equations, ab initio based calculations and CSMGem, for a wide variety of systems (total 26 systems tested) with reference to the experimental data.