Experimental and Computational Study of the Thermochemistry of the Fluoromethylaniline Isomers

How can fluorine directly and indirectly affect the hydrogen bonding in molecular systems? - A case study for monofluoroanilines

Hydrogen bonds (HBs) directly engaging fluorine has been extensively studied, but the indirect effect of fluorine on adjacent donors and acceptors is poorly understood and still difficult to predict. The indirect and direct effect of the fluorination of aniline on HB patterns observed in monofluoroanilines was studied via experimental (vibrational spectroscopy and crystal structure analysis) and theoretical (ab initio molecular dynamics and electrostatic surface potential) methods. It was found that a fluorine substituent decreases the strength and frequency of N-H⋯N HBs and, at the same time, increases the acidity of CH protons, enhancing the competitiveness of weaker interactions. Additionally, the position of fluorine in the aromatic ring strongly affects the C-F bond length, and a direct intramolecular N-H⋯F HB causes an increase in the N-H bond stability. We also provide a methodology to identify and separate individual HBs concerning the type of donor or acceptor from the ab initio molecular dynamics trajectories.

DFT computational study of trihalogenated aniline derivative's adsorption onto graphene/fullerene/fullerene-like nanocages, X12Y12 (X = Al, B, and Y = N, P)

Adsorption of 2,4,6-tribromoaniline (BA), 2,4,6-trifluoroaniline (FA) and 2,4,6-trichloroaniline (CA) onto the surface of coronene/fullerene/fullerene-like nanocages was investigated by theoretical calculations. Due to the adsorption of BA/FA/CA, there are significant changes in chemical descriptors and nonlinear optical properties. Energy gap values of all nanoclusters are lowered, giving an increase in conductivity of complexes except for fullerene. All complex's ultraviolet visible wavenumber is blue-shifted and especially for fullerene complex, the values are very high. The enhancement of Raman intensities shows that it is possible to design a nanocage sensor for detecting these compounds by surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS).Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.

Critical evaluation of the enthalpies of formation for fluorinated compounds using experimental data and high-level ab initio calculations

The ab initio method for prediction of the enthalpies of formation for CHON-containing organic compounds proposed earlier (J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2018, 14, 5920-5932) has been extended to their fluorinated derivatives. A single experimental Δ_f H ^o _m is typically available for compounds in this scope. Thus, a priori evaluation of the data quality was found to be inefficient despite all available experimental data for C₁─C₃ hydrofluorocarbons and 34 data points for medium-size organofluorine compounds being considered. The training set was derived by analyzing consistency of the experimental and predicted values and removal of outliers. Significant issues in the experimental data, including inconsistency across different laboratories, were identified and potential causes for these problems were discussed. A conservative estimate of uncertainty for the experimental Δ_f H ^o _m of organofluorine compounds was proposed.