Towards a Composite Benchmark Method for the Aqueous Solvation Free Energies of Organic Compounds

Water is ubiquitous in the biosphere, and the difficulty of rigorously treating the effects of aqueous solvation currently limits the widespread use of computational methods in many areas of environmental chemistry. We propose an approach to benchmark calculations of aqueous free energies of solvation based on molecular dynamics simulation which is derived from first principles, statistical mechanically complete, and systematically improvable. The approach partitions the solvation free energy into the free energies of solvent density change, solvent cavity organization, and solvent-solute interaction, each of which is computed from first principles. A composite approach is considered for the calculation of the contributions of quantum nuclear effects to solvation free energies and the contributions of electron correlation and relativistic effects to solvent-solute interactions.