The polarizable continuum model (PCM), used for the calculation of molecular energies, structures, and properties in liquid solution has been deeply revised, in order to extend its range of applications and to improve its accuracy. The main changes effect the definition of solute cavities, of solvation charges and of the PCM operator added to the molecular Hamiltonian, as well as the calculation of energy gradients, to be used in geometry optimizations. The procedure can be equally applied to quantum mechanical and to classical calculations; as shown also with a number of numerical tests, this PCM formulation is very efficient and reliable. It can also be applied to very large solutes, since all the bottlenecks have been eliminated to obtain a procedure whose time and memory requirements scale linearly with solute size. The present procedure can be used to compute solvent effects at a number of different levels of theory on almost all the chemical systems which can be studied in vacuo.

An approximate method, recently proposed to include in continuum solvation models the effects of electronic charge lying outside the solute cavity, has been adapted and implemented in the framework of the polarizable continuum model (PCM). This formulation exploits all the features already developed for the other PCM versions; it provides molecular free energies, gradients and second derivatives with respect to nuclear coordinates. The performances of this method have been tested in comparison with other PCM versions, in particular, we examined the reliability of this technique to reproduce actual volume charge distribution effects, compared to traditional procedures based on Gauss’ Law.

The hyperfine parameters of a number of representative free radicals have been computed by post‐Hartree–Fock and density functional approaches including averaging effects from large amplitude vibrations and solvent effects through a recent implementation of the polarizable continuum model. Our results show that fully ab initio hyperfine splittings are accurate enough to back the interpretation of experimental data and to allow an unbiased judgement of the role played by electronic, vibrational, and environmental effects in determining the observed value. The very good results obtained by a density functional approach including some Hartree–Fock exchange both for intrinsic values and for solvent shifts pave the route for the investigation of large biologically significant radicals in their natural aqueous medium.