Simulating water with rigid non-polarizable models: a general perspective

Over the last forty years many computer simulations of water have been performed using rigid non-polarizable models. Since these models describe water interactions in an approximate way it is evident that they cannot reproduce all of the properties of water. By now many properties for these kinds of models have been determined and it seems useful to compile some of these results and provide a critical view of the successes and failures. In this paper a test is proposed in which 17 properties of water, from the vapour and liquid to the solid phases, are taken into account to evaluate the performance of a water model. A certain number of points between zero (bad agreement) and ten (good agreement) are given for…