A fragment-based approach towards ab-initio treatment of polymeric materials

Abstract

The broad range of applications of $\pi$-conjugated polymeric materials in industries such as automobiles, textiles, packaging, medical etc. have led to their extensive studies in both academic and industrial fields. Predicting the structure of these polymers is important for the study of their properties. The present work uses a ‘divide and conquer’-type approach for the ab-initio studies of these polymeric systems. The method employs a fragmentation technique with independent fragment optimization for obtaining optimized geometries of the oligomers of various polymeric materials such as polyfuran, polypyrrole, polythiophene and other such $\pi$-conjugated polymers. A few test calculations performed in the study provide fair concurrence between the energies and the HOMO–LUMO energy gaps obtained using the fragmentation-based approach with those obtained using the full optimization of the whole oligomer. Also, a significant reduction in time complexity occurs for the present fragment-based approach compared to the parent system optimization. The results are encouraging and prompt for studies of large polymeric materials.