Simulating liquid water for determining its structural and transport properties

Molecular dynamics simulations are carried out for calculating structural and transport properties of pure liquid water, such as radial distribution functions and self-diffusion and viscosity coefficients, respectively. We employed reparameterized versions of the ab initio water potential by Niesar, Clementi and Corongiu (NCC). In order to investigate the role of the electrostatic contribution, the partial charges of the NCC model are adjusted so that to reproduce the dipole moment values of the SPC/E, SPC/Fw and TIP4P/2005 water models. The single and collective transport coefficients are obtained by employing the Green–Kubo relations at various temperatures. Additionally, in order to overcome convergence difficulties arising from the long correlation times of the stress-tensor autocorrelation functions, a previously reported fitting scheme was employed. The present results indicate that there is a significant relationship between the dipole moment value of the model, and the calculated transport coefficients. We found that by adjusting the molecular dipole moment of the NCC to the value of the TIP4P/2005, the obtained values for the self-diffusion and viscosity coefficients are in better agreement with experiment, compared to the values obtained with the original NCC model. Even though the predictions of the present model exhibits an overall correct behavior, we conclude that further improvements are still required. In order to achieve that, a careful reparameterization of the repulsion–dispersion terms of the potential model is proposed. Also, the effect of the inclusion of many-body effects such as polarizability, should also be investigated.

► Transport properties of liquid water are important in bio-simulations.
► Self-diffusion coefficient, shear and bulk viscosities calculations from NVE molecular dynamics simulations.
► Their comparison with experimental data provides information on intermolecular forces, and serve to develop water models.