Systematic Optimization of a Fragment-Based Force Field against Experimental Pure-Liquid Properties Considering Large Compound Families: Application to Saturated Haloalkanes

Direct optimization against experimental condensed-phase properties concerning small organic molecules still represents the most reliable way to calibrate the empirical parameters of a force field. However, compared to a corresponding calibration against quantum-mechanical (QM) calculations concerning isolated molecules, this approach is typically very tedious and time-consuming. The present article describes an integrated scheme for the automated refinement of force-field parameters against experimental condensed-phase data, considering entire classes of organic molecules constructed using a fragment library via combinatorial isomer enumeration. The main steps of the scheme, referred to as CombiFF, are as follows: (i) definition of a molecule family; (ii) combinatorial enumeration of all isomers; (iii) query for experimental data; (iv) automatic construction of the molecular topologies by fragment assembly; and (v) iterative refinement of the force-field parameters considering the entire family. As a first application, CombiFF is used here to design a GROMOS-compatible united-atom force field for the saturated acyclic haloalkane family. This force field relies on an electronegativity-equalization scheme for the atomic partial charges and involves no specific terms for σ-holes and halogen bonding. A total of 749 experimental liquid densities ρ_liq and vaporization enthalpies ΔH_vap concerning 486 haloalkanes are considered for calibration and validation. The resulting root-mean-square deviations from experiment are 49.8 (27.6) kg·m^–3 for ρ_liq and 2.7 (1.8) kJ·mol^–1 for ΔH_vap for the calibration (validation) set. The values are lower for the validation set which contains larger molecules (stronger influence of purely aliphatic interactions). The trends in the optimized parameters along the halogen series and across the compound family are in line with chemical intuition based on considerations related to size, polarizability, softness, electronegativity, induction, and hyperconjugation. This observation is particularly remarkable considering that the force-field calibration did not involve any QM calculation. Once the time-consuming task of target-data selection/curation has been performed, the optimization of a force field only takes a few days. As a result, CombiFF enables an easy assessment of the consequences of functional-form decisions on the accuracy of a force field at an optimal level of parametrization.