Performance of SCAN density functional for a set of ionic liquid ion pairs

Computational chemistry is a powerful tool for the discovery of novel materials. In particular, it is used to simulate ionic liquids in search of electrolytes for electrochemical applications. Herein, the choice of the computational method is not trivial, as it has to be both efficient and accurate. Density functional theory methods with appropriate corrections for the systematic weaknesses can give precision close to that of the post-Hartree–Fock coupled cluster methods with a fraction of their cost. Thence, we have evaluated the performance of a recently developed nonempirical strongly constrained and appropriately normed (SCAN) density functional on electronic structure calculations of ionic liquid ion pairs. The performance of SCAN and other popular functionals (PBE, M06-L, B2PLYP) among with Grimme's dispersion correction and Boys–Bernardi basis set superposition error correction was compared to DLPNO-CCSD(T)/CBS. We show that SCAN reproduces coupled-cluster results for describing the employed dataset of 48 ion pairs.