Predictions of fluidities of amines by molecular simulations: TraPPE-EH vs. OPLS-AA

Amines have several important industrial properties and commercial applications, such as gas sweetening and carbon capture; and the synthesis of: tranquilizers, decongestants, and azo dyes. For the design of many engineering applications, it is important to calculate the density and viscosity of the substances in order to determine how the fluids should be handled, stored, and discarded. In this work, the accuracy of two common force fields for amines, TraPPE-EH and OPLS-AA, was evaluated with respect to their predictions of liquid densities and fluidities for a large set of amine molecules including primary, secondary and tertiary. We propose the use of the reciprocal of viscosity, the fluidity, as a more accurate assessment of the predictions of viscosity at different temperatures. The fluidity was calculated using molecular dynamics in the isothermal-isobaric ensemble (NPT) along with the Green Kubo formalism. The simulation results were compared to available experimental information in order to provide a quantitative study of the force fields accuracy as well as their transferability to amines and thermodynamic conditions different to the ones used in their original parametrization. Overall, liquid densities and fluidities are well reproduced by the TraPPE-EH force field with absolute average deviations of 1.5% and 12%, respectively. However, important deviations were found for the OPLS-AA force field corresponding to 3.6% and 28% for density and fluidity respectively. In order to obtain better estimations of the fluidity, a temperature correction that accounts for the error in the liquid density predictions was proposed. Once the temperature correction was included the average deviation of the fluidity decreased to 10% for TraPPE-EH and to 18% for OPLS-AA.