High-accuracy ab initio thermochemistry : application to hydrocarbons

This work focuses on an examination of the high-accuracy extrapoloated ab initio thermochemistry (HEAT) protocol of determining molecular atomization energies. The HEAT protocol does not utilize experimental data or empirical scaling effects. The accuracy of the approach is tested via comparison to ATcT data, and all molecules fall within 1 kcal/mol of accepted values. There are several important points to note about this treatment: namely, that we have used atomic natural orbital (ANO) basis sets for the calculation of the zero point energy and that we have made determinations for larger molecules than previously done with HEAT. The molecules in this paper were chosen to provide benchmark numbers for the homodesmotic reaction heirarchy as described by Wheeler et al.[3] The relative accuracy of the approach is considered, as well as a discussion of possible remaining sources of error.