Acta Crystallographica Section B

Structural Science

Volume 58, Part 6 (December 2002)


research papers



HTML versionpdf versionsupplementary materialscited insimilar papers buy article online

Acta Cryst. (2002). B58, 1025-1031    [ doi:10.1107/S010876810201981X ]

Crystal packing in vicinal diols CnHm(OH)2

C. P. Brock

Abstract: The O-H...O bonds in vic-diols CnHm(OH)2 have been studied using data retrieved from the Cambridge Structural Database. About half of these diols form complete, or almost complete, sets of intermolecular O-H...O bonds (i.e. two satisfied donors per molecule). For this half of the structures the frequencies of high-symmetry space groups and of structures with Z'  >  1 (more than one molecule in the asymmetric unit) are substantially elevated. The most common motif among fully bonded structures is an R22 (10) dimer, which can be linked in a variety of ways to form one-, two- or even three-dimensional patterns. Most of the other half of the vic-diols form simple O-H...O chains in which each OH group participates in only one intermolecular hydrogen bond. The space-group frequencies for this second group of structures are unexceptional. The most important factor determining the extent of O-H...O bond formation is the degree of substitution of the vic-diol. The spatial segregation of OH groups that is necessary for the formation of O-H...O bonds is found to make the dense filling of space more difficult because the intermolecular spacings that are appropriate for the O-H...O bonds may be inappropriate for the rest of the molecule.

Keywords: hydrogen-bonding patterns; vicinal diols.


pdfdisplay filedownload file

PDF file (27.7 kbytes)
Information on the 71 vic-diol structures


Notes:

To open or display or play some files, you may need to set your browser up to use the appropriate software. See the full list of file types for an explanation of the different file types and their related mime types and, where available links to sites from where the appropriate software may be obtained.

The download button will force most browsers to prompt for a file name to store the data on your hard disk.

Where possible, images are represented by thumbnails.

 bibliographic record in  format

  Find reference:   Volume   Page   
  Search:     From   to      Advanced search

Copyright © International Union of Crystallography
IUCr Webmaster