Implementation of the SM12 Solvation Model into ADF and Comparison with COSMO

In this article, an implementation of the newest iteration of the Minnesota solvation model, SM12, into the Amsterdam density functional (ADF) computational package is presented. ADF makes exclusive use of Slater-type orbitals (STO), which correctly represent the true atomic orbitals for atoms, whereas SM12 and the underlying charge model 5 (CM5) have previously only been tested on Gaussian-type orbitals (GTO). This new implementation is used to prove the basis set independence of both CM5 and SM12. A detailed comparison of the SM12 and COSMO solvation models, as implemented in ADF, is also presented. We show that this new implementation of SM12 has a mean unsigned error (MUE) of 0.68 kcal/mol for 272 molecules in water solvent, 4.10 kcal/mol MUE for 112 charged ions in water, and 0.92 kcal/mol MUE for 197 solvent calculations of various molecules. SM12 outperforms COSMO for all neutral molecules and performs as well as COSMO for cationic molecules, only falling short when anionic molecules are taken into consideration, likely due to CM5's use of Hirshfeld charges and their poor description of anionic molecules, though CM5 seems to improve upon this discrepancy.