Soft porous crystals undergo large structural transformations under a variety of physical stimuli. Breathing-like transformations, occurring with a large volume change, have been associated with an existence of bi-stable or multi-stable crystal structures. Understanding of the mechanism of these transformations is essential for their potential applications in gas adsorption, separation and storage. However, the generic description is still missing. Here, we provide a detailed, multiscale qualitative and quantitative analysis of the adsorption-induced "breathing" transformations in two metal organic frameworks (MOFs): MIL-53(Al) which is a reference case of our approach, and recently synthesized JUK-8, which does not show any bistability without adsorbate. The proposed approach is based on atomistic simulations and does not require any empirical or adjustable parameters. It allows for a prediction of potential structural transformations in MOFs including the adsorption induced deformations derived from adsorption stress model. We also show that the quantitative agreement between calculated and experimental results critically depends on the quality of the dispersion energy correction. Our methodology represents a new, powerful tool for designing and screening of flexible materials, alternative and complimentary to experimental approaches.

The adequate choice of the interaction model is essential to reproduce qualitatively and estimate quantitatively the experimentally observed characteristics of materials or phenomena in computer simulations. Here we present the results of a benchmarking of density-functional theory calculations of rigid and flexible metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). The stability of these systems depends on the dispersion interactions. We compare the performance of two functionals, Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) and PBE designed for solids, with and without the dispersion corrections (D2 and TS), in reproducing the high-accuracy low-temperature X-ray and neutron diffraction data for both groups of MOFs. We focus our analysis on the key structural parameters: the lattice parameters, bond lengths, and angles. We show that the dispersion long range correction is essential to stabilize the structures and, in some cases, to converge the system to a geometry that is in line with the experimentally observed structure, especially for breathing MIL-53 structures or zeolitic imidazolate frameworks. We find that for all structures and all analyzed parameters, the D2-corrected PBE functional performs the best, except for bonds involving the metal ions; however, even for these bonds the difference between the experimentally observed and calculated lengths is small. Therefore, we recommend the use of the PBE-D2 functional in further numerical analyses of rigid and flexible nanoporous MOFs.