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Updated: Jun 22, 2026

Computation of Atmospheric Concentrations of Molecular Clusters from ab initio Thermochemistry
Published on: April 8, 2020
Molecular dynamics simulations of bromine clathrate hydrates
Daniel P Schofield1, Kenneth D Jordan
1Department of Chemistry and Center for Molecular and Materials Simulations, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA.
Abstract:
A polarizable force field that explicitly includes contributions from exchange repulsion, dispersion, charge penetration, and multipole electrostatics was developed to describe the interaction between bromine and water. This force field was combined with a polarizable force field for water and used in molecular dynamics simulations to calculate the relative energetics of three bromine clathrate hydrates. The simulations predict the tetragonal structure (Allen, K. W.; Jeffrey, G. A. J. Chem. Phys. 1963, 38, 2304) to be the most stable, with the CS-I and CS-II cubic structures being less stable. Although the CS-II species is not the most stable energetically, we argue that it could be formed under conditions of low bromine concentration, in agreement with recent measurements (Goldschleger, I. U.; Kerenskaya, G.; Janda, K. C.; Apkarian, V. A. J. Phys. Chem. A 2008, 112, 787) that provide evidence for three different bromine hydrate crystal types.
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