Terry L. Threlfall

A multinuclear solid state NMR, density functional theory and X-Ray diffraction study of hydrogen bonding in Group I hydrogen dibenzoates

An NMR crystallographic approach incorporating multinuclear solid state NMR (SSNMR), X-ray structure determinations and density functional theory (DFT) are used to characterise the H bonding arrangements in benzoic acid (BZA) and the corresponding Group I alkali metal hydrogen dibenzoates (HD) systems. Since the XRD data often cannot precisely confirm the proton position within the hydrogen bond, the relationship between the experimental SSNMR parameters and the ability of gauge included plane augmented wave (GIPAW) DFT to predict them becomes a powerful constraint that can assist with further structure refinement. Both the 1H and 13C MAS NMR methods provide primary descriptions of the H bonding via accurate measurements of the 1H and 13C isotropic chemical shifts, and the individual 13C chemical shift tensor elements; these are unequivocally corroborated by DFT calculations, which together accurately describe the trend of the H bonding strength as the size of the monovalent cation changes. In addition, 17O MAS and DOR NMR form a powerful combination to characterise the O environments, with the DOR technique providing highly resolved 17O NMR data which helps verify unequivocally the number of inequivalent O positions for the conventional 17O MAS NMR to process. Further multinuclear MAS and static NMR studies involving the quadrupolar 7Li, 39K, 87Rb and 133Cs nuclei, and the associated DFT calculations, provide trends and a corroboration of the H bond geometry which assist in the understanding of these arrangements. Even though the crystallographic H positions in each H bonding arrangement reported from the single crystal X-ray studies are prone to uncertainty, the good corroboration between the measured and DFT calculated chemical shift and quadrupole tensor parameters for the Group I alkali species suggest that these reported H positions are reliable.

Relationships between the racemic structures of substituted mandelic acids containing 8- and 10-membered hydrogen bonded dimer rings

The structures of 27 monosubstituted mandelic acids, including several of their polymorphs, plus unsubstituted mandelic acid itself (two polymorphs) are investigated for structural similarity. The results, presented pictorially as a structural relationship plot, show that rather more structures are built up from the carboxyl-chain hydroxyl hydrogen bonded dimer than from the conventional carboxylic acid dimer. The results show how all the structures are related and, based on the two types of dimer, the degree of similarity that they possess. Some structures with Z′ > 1 contain both sorts of dimers and there are many examples of isostructural sets within the structures so far determined. We also present an example where analysing similarity in related families of structures highlights a structure that should be present and which has indeed then proceeded to be synthesised and determined.

A systematic comparison of the structures of substituted mandelic acids

For several years we have been making detailed comparisons of the crystal structures of large sets of related compounds in an attempt to understand the factors determining the adoption of particular molecular arrangements within crystal structures [1-2]. In all these projects, the XPac program [3] was used to identify similarity between structures in 0-dimensions (0D) (discrete molecular arrangements e.g. dimers, trimers etc),1D (chains or stacks), 2D (sheets or planes) and 3D (frameworks or full isostructurality) as a preliminary to the detailed comparison of the similarities so identified. As part of a larger crystallographic project to investigate the relationship between structure and chirality, we have synthesized and determined crystal structures of families of monosubstituted racemic mandelic acids with fluoro, chloro, bromo, iodo, trifluoromethyl, methyl and methoxy substituents at the ortho, meta and para positions. Of these 21 permutations only four are described in the literature [5-8].