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Updated: Mar 5, 2026

Multiscale Sampling of a Heterogeneous Water/Metal Catalyst Interface using Density Functional Theory and Force-Field Molecular Dynamics
Published on: April 12, 2019
Hydrogen Transfer in Energetic Materials from ReaxFF and DFT Calculations
Oleg V Sergeev1,2, Alexey V Yanilkin1,2
1Center for Fundamental and Applied Research, Dukhov Research Institute of Automatics , P.O. Box 918, Moscow 101000, Russia.
Abstract:
Energetic materials are characterized by fast and complex chemical reactions. It makes them hardly available for kinetic experiments in relevant conditions and a good target for reactive molecular dynamics simulations. In this work, unimolecular and condensed-phase thermal decomposition of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) are investigated by ReaxFF molecular dynamics. It is shown that the decomposition kinetics in condensed phase may be described with the activation barrier lower by a factor of 2 than that for isolated molecules. The effect of the intermolecular hydrogen transfer is revealed in condensed phase. Energetic barriers for hydrogen transfer in two energetic materials (methyl nitrate, which is a nitroester as well as PETN, and o-nitrotoluene) are studied with ReaxFF and DFT using nudged elastic band technique. The results indicate that ReaxFF gives significantly lower activation energy for intermolecular hydrogen transfer in nitroesters than different DFT approximations, which explains the molecular dynamics results for PETN.
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