Open AccessDispersion Interactions and the Stability of Amine Dimers
Author(s) -
Guttmann Robin,
Sax Alexander F.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
chemistryopen
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.644
H-Index - 29
ISSN - 2191-1363
DOI - 10.1002/open.201700052
Subject(s) - chemical physics , chemistry , interaction energy , intermolecular force , alkyl , dispersion (optics) , hydrogen bond , alkane , dimer , london dispersion force , conformational isomerism , computational chemistry , molecule , amine gas treating , density functional theory , chemical stability , van der waals force , organic chemistry , hydrocarbon , physics , optics
Weak, intermolecular interactions in amine dimers were studied by using the combination of a dispersionless density functional and a function that describes the dispersion contribution to the interaction energy. The validity of this method was shown by comparison of structural and energetic properties with data obtained with a conventional density functional and the coupled cluster method. The stability of amine dimers was shown to depend on the size, the shape, and the relative orientation of the alkyl substituents, and it was shown that the stabilization energy for large substituents is dominated by dispersion interactions. In contrast to traditional chemical explanations that attribute stability and condensed matter properties solely to hydrogen bonding and, thus, to the properties of the atoms forming the hydrogen bridge, we show that without dispersion interactions not even the stability and structure of the ammonia dimer can be correctly described. The stability of amine dimers depends crucially on the interaction between the non‐polar alkyl groups, which is dominated by dispersion interactions. This interaction is also responsible for the energetic part of the free energy interaction used to describe hydrophobic interactions in liquid alkanes. The entropic part has its origin in the high degeneracy of the interaction energy for complexes of alkane molecules, which exist in a great variety of conformers, having their origin in internal rotations of the alkane chains.