In practical DFT calculations, the forms of the approximate exchange-correlation functionals used are quite complicated, such that the required integrals involving the functionals generally cannot be evaluated analytically. Q-Chem evaluates these integrals through numerical quadrature directly applied to the exchange-correlation integrand. Several standard quadrature grids are available (“SG-$n$”, $n=0,1,2,3$), with a default value that is automatically set according to the complexity of the functional in question.
 $E_{\mathrm{XC}}=\sum_{A}^{\rm atoms}\sum_{i\in A}^{\rm points}w_{Ai}f(\mathbf{% r}_{Ai})\;,$ (5.15)
where the function $f$ is the aforementioned XC integrand and the quantities $w_{Ai}$ are the quadrature weights. The sum over $i$ runs over grid points belonging to atom $A$, which are located at positions $\mathbf{r}_{Ai}=\mathbf{R}_{A}+\mathbf{r}_{i}$, so this approach requires only the choice of a suitable one-center integration grid (to define the $\mathbf{r}_{i}$), which is independent of nuclear configuration. These grids are implemented in Q-Chem in a way that ensures that the $E_{\rm XC}$ is rotationally-invariant, i.e., that is does not change when the molecule undergoes rigid rotation in space.
Quadrature grids are further separated into radial and angular parts. Within Q-Chem, the radial part is usually treated by the Euler-Maclaurin scheme proposed by Murray et al., which maps the semi-infinite domain $[0,\infty)$ onto $[0,1)$ and applies the extended trapezoid rule to the transformed integrand. Alternatively, Gill and Chien proposed a radial scheme based on a Gaussian quadrature on the interval $[0,1]$ with a different weight function. This “MultiExp" radial quadrature is exact for integrands that are a linear combination of a geometric sequence of exponential functions, and is therefore well suited to evaluating atomic integrals. However, the task of generating the MultiExp quadrature points becomes increasingly ill-conditioned as the number of radial points increases, so that a “double exponential" radial quadrature , is used for the largest standard grids in Q-Chem, , namely SG-2 and SG-3. (See Section 5.5.2.)