Large-scale calculations of gas phase thermochemistry: Enthalpy of formation, standard entropy, and heat capacity

Large scale quantum calculations for molar enthalpy of formation (Δ f H 0), standard entropy (S 0), and heat capacity (CV ) are presented. A large data set may help to evaluate quantum thermochemistry tools in order to uncover possible hidden shortcomings and also to find experimental data that might need to be reinvestigated, indeed we list and annotate approximately 200 problematic thermochemistry measurements. Quantum methods systematically underestimate S 0 for flexible molecules in the gas phase if only a single (minimum energy) conformation is taken into account. This problem can be tackled in principle by performing thermochemistry calculations for all stable conformations [Zheng et al., Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 13, 10885–10907 (2011)], but this is not practical for large molecules. We observe that the deviation of composite quantum thermochemistry recipes from experimental S 0 corresponds roughly to the Boltzmann equation (S = RlnΩ), where R is the gas constant and Ω the number of possible conformations. This allows an empirical correction of the calculated entropy for molecules with multiple conformations. With the correction we find an RMSD from experiment of ≈13 J/mol K for 1273 compounds. This paper also provides predictions of Δ f H 0, S 0, and CV for well over 700 compounds for which no experimental data could be found in the literature. Finally, in order to facilitate the analysis of thermodynamics properties by others we have implemented a new tool obthermo in the OpenBabel program suite [O’Boyle et al., J. Cheminf. 3, 33 (2011)] including a table of reference atomization energy values for popular thermochemistry methods.