Quantum mechanical calculation of nanomaterial-ligand interaction energies by molecular fractionation with conjugated caps method

Molecular fractionation with conjugate caps (MFCC) method is introduced for the efficient estimation of quantum mechanical (QM) interaction energies between nanomaterial (carbon nanotube, fullerene, and graphene surface) and ligand (charged and neutral). In the calculations, nanomaterials are partitioned into small fragments and conjugated caps that are properly capped, and the interaction energies can be obtained through the summation of QM calculations of the fragments from which the contribution of the conjugated caps is removed. All the calculations were performed by density functional theory (DFT) and dispersion contributions for the attractive interactions were investigated by dispersion corrected DFT method. The predicted interaction energies by MFCC at each computational level are found to give excellent agreement with full system (FS) calculations with the mean energy deviation just a fractional kcal/mol. The accurate determination of nanomaterial-ligand interaction energies by MFCC suggests that it is an effective method for performing QM calculations on nanomaterial-ligand systems.