Nonadditive Empirical Force Fields for Short-Chain Linear Alcohols: Methanol to Butanol. Hydration Free Energetics and Kirkwood-Buff Analysis Using Charge Equilibration Models

Building upon the nonadditive electrostatic force field for alcohols based on the CHARMM charge equilibration (CHEQ) formalism, we introduce atom-pair specific solute-solvent Lennard-Jones (LJ) parameters for alcohol-water interaction force fields targeting improved agreement with experimental hydration free energies of a series of small molecule linear alcohols as well as ab initio water-alcohol geometries and energetics. We consider short-chain, linear alcohols from methanol to butanol as they are canonical small-molecule organic model compounds to represent the hydroxyl chemical functionality for parametrizing biomolecular force fields for proteins. We discuss molecular dynamics simulations of dilute aqueous solutions of methanol and ethanol in TIP4P-FQ water, with particular discussion of solution densities, structure defined in radial distribution functions, electrostatic properties (dipole moment distributions), hydrogen bonding patterns of water, as well as a Kirkwood-Buff (KB) integral analysis. Calculation of the latter provides an assessment of how well classical force fields parametrized to at least semiquantitatively match experimental hydration free energies capture the microscopic structures of dilute alcohol solutions; the latter translate into macroscopic thermodynamic properties through the application of KB analysis. We find that the CHEQ alcohol force fields of this work semiquantitatively match experimental KB integrals for methanol and ethanol mole fractions of 0.1 and 0.2. The force field combination qualitatively captures the concentration dependence of the alcohol-alcohol and water-water KB integrals, but due to inadequacies in the representation of the microscopic structures in such systems (which cannot be parametrized in any systematic fashion), a priori quantitative description of alcohol-water KB integrals remains elusive.