Journal of Crystal Growth, Vol.311, No.13, 3498-3510, 2009
Prediction of molecular crystal structures using a genetic algorithm: Validation by GenMol (TM) on energetic compounds
This work deals with the problem of finding for a given industrial target the molecule conformation leading to the most efficient crystal polymorph and/or designing unknown crystal packing of new molecules. The originality of the method relies first on constraining the domain of the most probable crystals, before converging towards the predicted packing by a double genetic-refining optimization algorithm. Validation of this approach is discussed on the case study of 46 energetic crystal compounds, using the semi Ab Initio and Molecular Mechanics code GenMol(TM). This validation shows that all observed structures are retrieved in any circumstances with a relatively high number of good rankings. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.