Prediction of Accurate Thermochemistry of Medium and Large Sized Radicals Using Connectivity-Based Hierarchy (CBH)

Accurate modeling of the chemical reactions in many diverse areas such as combustion, photochemistry, or atmospheric chemistry strongly depends on the availability of thermochemical information of the radicals involved. However, accurate thermochemical investigations of radical systems using state of the art composite methods have mostly been restricted to the study of hydrocarbon radicals of modest size. In an alternative approach, systematic error-canceling thermochemical hierarchy of reaction schemes can be applied to yield accurate results for such systems. In this work, we have extended our connectivity-based hierarchy (CBH) method to the investigation of radical systems. We have calibrated our method using a test set of 30 medium sized radicals to evaluate their heats of formation. The CBH-rad30 test set contains radicals containing diverse functional groups as well as cyclic systems. We demonstrate that the sophisticated error-canceling isoatomic scheme (CBH-2) with modest levels of theory is adequate to provide heats of formation accurate to ∼1.5 kcal/mol. Finally, we predict heats of formation of 19 other large and medium sized radicals for which the accuracy of available heats of formation are less well-known.