Adsorption simulations often assume a rigid framework, which can be exploited by replacing the expensive framework-adsorbate energy/force evaluation by interpolation of a precomputed energy grid. We present the implementation in RASPA3 of a triquintic interpolation algorithm by Boateng and Bradach and compare it to the tricubic algorithm of Lekien and Marsden. We extended the scheme to interpolation in fractional space to facilitate interpolation of non-rectangular frameworks and evaluated the accuracy. We find that the use of grids is advantageous for larger systems and/or large cutoffs, but generally the efficiency gains are modest (a factor of 2–5).

We present RASPA3, a molecular simulation code for computing adsorption and diffusion in nanoporous materials and thermodynamic and transport properties of fluids. It implements force field based classical Monte Carlo/molecular dynamics in various ensembles. In this article, we introduce the new additions and changes compared to RASPA2. RASPA3 is rewritten from the ground up in C++23 with speed and code readability in mind. Transition-matrix Monte Carlo is added to compute the density of states and free energies. The Monte Carlo code for rigid molecules is based on quaternions, and the atomic positions needed in the energy evaluation are recreated from the center of mass position and quaternion orientation. The expanded ensemble methodology for fractional molecules, with a scaling parameter λ between 0 and 1, now also keeps track of analytic expressions of dU/dλ, allowing independent verification of the chemical potential using thermodynamic integration. The source code is freely available under the MIT license on GitHub. Using this code, we compare four Monte Carlo (MC) insertion/deletion techniques: unbiased Metropolis MC, Configurational-Bias Monte Carlo (CBMC), Continuous Fractional Component MC (CFCMC), and CB/CFCMC. We compare particle distribution shapes, acceptance ratios, accuracy and speed of isotherm computation, enthalpies of adsorption, and chemical potentials, over a wide range of loadings and systems, for the grand canonical ensemble and for the Gibbs ensemble.