Combustion of renewable biofuels, including energy-dense biodiesel, is expected to contribute significantly toward meeting future energy demands in the transportation sector. Elucidating detailed reaction mechanisms will be crucial to understanding biodiesel combustion, and hydrogen abstraction reactions are expected to dominate biodiesel combustion during ignition. In this work, we investigate hydrogen abstraction by the radicals H·, CH(3)·, O·, HO(2)·, and OH· from methyl formate, the simplest surrogate for complex biodiesels. We evaluate the H abstraction barrier heights and reaction enthalpies, using multireference correlated wave function methods including size-extensivity corrections and extrapolation to the complete basis set limit. The barrier heights predicted for abstraction by H·, CH(3)·, and O· are in excellent agreement with derived experimental values, with errors ≤1 kcal/mol. We also predict the reaction energetics for forming reactant complexes, transition states, and product complexes for reactions involving HO(2)· and OH·. High-pressure-limit rate constants are computed using transition state theory within the separable-hindered-rotor approximation for torsions and the harmonic oscillator approximation for other vibrational modes. The predicted rate constants differ significantly from those appearing in the latest combustion kinetics models of these reactions.

Oxygenated hydrocarbons play important roles in combustion science as renewable fuels and additives, but many details about their combustion chemistry remain poorly understood. Although many methods exist for computing accurate electronic energies of molecules at equilibrium geometries, a consistent description of entire combustion reaction potential energy surfaces (PESs) requires multireference correlated wavefunction theories. Here we use bond dissociation energies (BDEs) as a foundational metric to benchmark methods based on multireference configuration interaction (MRCI) for several classes of oxygenated compounds (alcohols, aldehydes, carboxylic acids, and methyl esters). We compare results from multireference singles and doubles configuration interaction to those utilizing a posteriori and a priori size-extensivity corrections, benchmarked against experiment and coupled cluster theory. We demonstrate that size-extensivity corrections are necessary for chemically accurate BDE predictions even in relatively small molecules and furnish examples of unphysical BDE predictions resulting from using too-small orbital active spaces. We also outline the specific challenges in using MRCI methods for carbonyl-containing compounds. The resulting complete basis set extrapolated, size-extensivity-corrected MRCI scheme produces BDEs generally accurate to within 1 kcal/mol, laying the foundation for this scheme's use on larger molecules and for more complex regions of combustion PESs.

Multi-reference Configuration Interaction (MRCI) is often used to predict the electronic structures and reaction energetics of small molecules with very high accuracy. Unfortunately, MRCI is inapplicable to large or even medium-sized molecules for two reasons: its computational cost scales poorly with molecule size and MRCI methods are not size extensive, leading to large energy errors. We have developed a new local (L) and approximately size extensive MRCI method that addresses both shortcomings. Truncating long-range electron correlation in a local orbital basis as well as efficient processing of two-electron integrals via Cholesky decomposition (CD) and integral screening reduce the computational cost to O(N(3)) with a small prefactor. A priori and a posteriori size extensivity corrections are both considered. The Multi-reference Averaged Coupled-Pair Functional (MRACPF) provides approximate size extensivity by modifying the energy functional. The very inexpensive Davidson-Silver and Pople a posteriori schemes also produce quite accurate corrections over a large range of molecular size. Employing CD-LMRACPF is slightly more expensive than using a Davidson-type correction, but the former gives superior results. Molecules with up to 50 heavy atoms can be treated with our CD-LMRACPF method thus far.

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We previously developed a fast, local, reduced scaling Cholesky-decomposed multireference averaged-coupled pair functional (CD-LMRACPF2) method, which takes advantage of the locality of dynamic correlation and numerical approximations such as Cholesky decomposition and integral screening. Motivated by the desire to study large biodiesel methyl ester molecules, here we validate CD-LMRACPF2 for the computation of bond dissociation energies (BDEs) in a suite of oxygenated molecules, and show that the low-cost method is very accurate compared to the conventional variant. We then demonstrate the power of CD-LMRACPF2 for fast and accurate computation of energies of molecules containing up to 13 second-row atoms within a polarized triple-ζ (cc-pVTZ) basis set. We use biodiesel methyl esters as a chemically interesting model system and furnish BDEs of C10 and C18 methyl esters, with the latter performed within a cc-pVDZ basis set. We describe trends in the BDEs and explain how structural (isomeric) differences affect BDEs, as well as discuss implications of BDE trends for biodiesel physical and chemical properties.