The origin and strength of intra- and inter-molecular vibrational coupling is difficult to probe by direct experimental observations. However, explicitly including or not including some specific intramolecular vibrational modes to study intermolecular interaction provides a precise theoretical way to examine the effects of anharmonic coupling between modes. In this work, a full-dimension intra- and inter-molecular ab initio potential energy surface (PES) for H2O-Ar, which explicitly incorporates interdependence on the intramolecular (Q1,  Q2,  Q3) normal-mode coordinates of the H2O monomer, has been calculated. In addition, four analytic vibrational-quantum-state-specific PESs are obtained by least-squares fitting vibrationally averaged interaction energies for the (v1,  v2,  v3) =  (0,  0,  0), (0,  0,  1), (1,  0,  0), (0,  1,  0) states of H2O to the three-dimensional Morse/long-range potential function. Each vibrationally averaged PES fitted to 442 points has root-mean-square (rms) deviation smaller than 0.15 cm(-1), and required only 58 parameters. With the 3D PESs of H2O-Ar dimer system, we employed the combined radial discrete variable representation/angular finite basis representation method and Lanczos algorithm to calculate rovibrational energy levels. This showed that the resulting vibrationally averaged PESs provide good representations of the experimental infrared data, with rms discrepancies smaller than 0.02 cm(-1) for all three rotational branches of the asymmetric stretch fundamental transitions. The infrared band origin shifts associated with three fundamental bands of H2O in H2O-Ar complex are predicted for the first time and are found to be in good agreement with the (extrapolated) experimental values. Upon introduction of additional intramolecular degrees of freedom into the intermolecular potential energy surface, there is clear spectroscopic evidence of intra- and intermolecular vibrational couplings.

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Pervaporation has attracted considerable interest owing to its potential application in recovering biobutanol from biomass acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation broth. In this study, butanol was recovered from its aqueous solution using a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)/ceramic composite pervaporation membrane. The effects of operating temperature, feed concentration, feed flow rate and operating time on the membrane pervaporation performance were investigated. It was found that with the increase of temperature or butanol concentration in the feed, the total flux through the membrane increased while the separation factor decreased slightly. As the feed flow rate increased, the total flux increased gradually while the separation factor changed little. At 40 °C and 1% (by mass) butanol in the feed, the total flux and separation factor of the membrane reached 457.4 g•m −2 •h −1 and 26.1, respectively. The membrane with high flux is suitable for recovering butanol from ABE fermentation broth.

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Hyperhalogens are a class of highly electronegative molecules whose electron affinities even exceed those of their superhalogen ligands. Such species can serve as new oxidizing agents, biocatalysts, and building blocks of unusual salts, and hence are important to the chemical industry. Utilizing stable N5(-) as the ligand, a series of aromatic hyperhalogen anions, namely mononuclear M(N5)(k+1)(-) (M = Li, Be, B) and dinuclear M2(N5)(2k+1)(-) (M = Li, Be), have been reported here for the first time. Calculation results based on the density functional theory revealed that all the N5(-) subunits preserve their structural and electronic integrity as well as aromatic characteristics in these anions. Especially, these anionic molecules exhibit larger vertical electron detachment energies (6.76-7.86 eV) than that of the superhalogen ligand N5(-), confirming their hyperhalogen nature. The stability of these studied anions is guaranteed by their large HOMO-LUMO gaps, and positive dissociation energies of predetermined fragmentation pathways. We hope this work will not only provide evidence of a new type of hyperhalogen molecule but also stimulate more research interest and efforts in the amazing superatom realm.