Adaptive accelerated ReaxFF reactive dynamics with validation from simulating hydrogen combustion

We develop here the methodology for dramatically accelerating the ReaxFF reactive force field based reactive molecular dynamics (RMD) simulations through use of the bond boost concept (BB), which we validate here for describing hydrogen combustion. The bond order, undercoordination, and overcoordination concepts of ReaxFF ensure that the BB correctly adapts to the instantaneous configurations in the reactive system to automatically identify the reactions appropriate to receive the bond boost. We refer to this as adaptive Accelerated ReaxFF Reactive Dynamics or aARRDyn. To validate the aARRDyn methodology, we determined the detailed sequence of reactions for hydrogen combustion with and without the BB. We validate that the kinetics and reaction mechanisms (that is the detailed sequences of reactive intermediates and their subsequent transformation to others) for H₂ oxidation obtained from aARRDyn agrees well with the brute force reactive molecular dynamics (BF-RMD) at 2498 K. Using aARRDyn, we then extend our simulations to the whole range of combustion temperatures from ignition (798 K) to flame temperature (2998K), and demonstrate that, over this full temperature range, the reaction rates predicted by aARRDyn agree well with the BF-RMD values, extrapolated to lower temperatures. For the aARRDyn simulation at 798 K we find that the time period for half the H ₂ to form H₂O product is ∼538 s, whereas the computational cost was just 1289 ps, a speed increase of ∼0.42 trillion (10¹²) over BF-RMD. In carrying out these RMD simulations we found that the ReaxFF-COH2008 version of the ReaxFF force field was not accurate for such intermediates as H₃O. Consequently we reoptimized the fit to a quantum mechanics (QM) level, leading to the ReaxFF-OH2014 force field that was used in the simulations.