H2 Adsorbed Site-to-Site Electronic Delocalization within IRMOF-1: Understanding Non-Negligible Interactions at High Pressure

Isoreticular metal organic frameworks (IRMOFs) have shown high uptake capabilities for storage of H₂ (11.5 wt % at 77 K and 170 bar). A significant literature has employed fragment models and a single adsorbed H₂ to identify adsorption sites within IRMOFs, as well as the necessary adsorbate-adsorbent interactions needed to reach sufficient adsorption enthalpy for practical usage, however at high pressures it remains to be seen if H₂···H₂ intermolecular interactions may influence the energetics. This study focuses upon IRMOF-1 (also known as MOF-5), and examines the individual H₂ stabilization energies at different sites using Möller-Plesset perturbation theory and density functional theory alongside chemical models that consist of isolated fragment models and a cubic super cell cluster consisting of both the face- and edge-cube's of IRMOF-1. Optimization of twenty stable configurations of singly adsorbed H₂ in the super-cell cluster is observed to be essential to obtain energy ordering of the five primary sites consistent with experiment and prior benchmark calculations (α >> β > γ > δ ≈ ε). To examine site-to-site interactions that may occur in the high-pressure regime, 64 co-adsorbed H₂ within a super-cell cluster have been studied (a theoretical maximum of all adsorption sites, 14 wt %). There, delocalization and/or charge transfer of electrons is observed from the σ orbitals of the H₂ bound at the γ positions into the σ* orbitals of H₂ bound at the α sites leads to stabilization of the interaction of H₂ at the γ, by 1.4 kJ/mol, respectively (using M06-2X/LANL2DZ). This effect has been confirmed to be charge transfer, and not a manifestation of enhanced dispersion at high loading, through natural bond order (NBO) analysis and by comparisons of the square of off-diagonal NBO Fock matrix elements for both density functionals that account for dispersion interactions and Hartree-Fock calculations that ignore dispersion.