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Updated: Nov 29, 2025

Computation of Atmospheric Concentrations of Molecular Clusters from ab initio Thermochemistry
Published on: April 8, 2020
Thermochemical stabilities of giant fullerenes using density functional tight binding theory and isodesmic-type
Simone L Waite1, Amir Karton2, Bun Chan3
1School of Environmental and Life Sciences, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, Australia.
Abstract:
We present a systematic assessment of the density functional tight binding (DFTB) method for calculating heats of formation of fullerenes with isodesmic-type reaction schemes. We show that DFTB3-D/3ob can accurately predict Δf H values of the 1812 structural isomers of C60 , reproduce subtle trends in Δf H values for 24 isolated pentagon rule (IPR) isomers of C84 , and predict Δf H values of giant fullerenes that are in effectively exact agreement with benchmark DSD-PBEP86/def2-QZVPP calculations. For fullerenes up to C320 , DFTB Δf H values are within 1.0 kJ mol-1 of DSD-PBEP86/def2-QZVPP values per carbon atom, and on a per carbon atom basis DFTB3-D/3ob yields exactly the same numerical trend of (Δf H [per carbon] = 722n-0.72 + 5.2 kJ mol-1 ). DFTB3-D/3ob is therefore an accurate replacement for high-level DHDFT and composite thermochemical methods in predicting of thermochemical stabilities of giant fullerenes and analogous nanocarbon architectures.
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