화학공학소재연구정보센터
Inorganic Chemistry, Vol.45, No.19, 7947-7954, 2006
Prediction of pK(a) values of nido-carboranes by density functional theory methods
A great parallel exists between metal complexes of cyclopentadienyl and arene ligands on one side and metal complexes of the nido derivatives of the icosahedral o-carborane clusters. With few exceptions, the metal complexation in the cluster can be viewed as the substitution of one or more bridging hydrogen atoms by the metal. Therefore, a necessary requirement for the complexation is the deprotonation of the nido cluster to generate a coordination site for that metal. The reaction to remove these protons, which most probably is one of the most commonly done processes in boron and metallaborane chemistry, is barely known, and no quantitative data are available on the magnitude of their p K a values. With the purpose of determining the acidity of nido-carboranes, a procedure to calculate the p K a values of nido boron clusters is presented in this paper for the first time. To this objective, some nido clusters have been selected and their geometry and NMR-spectroscopic properties have been studied, giving a good correlation between the theoretical and experimental data in both geometry distances and B-11 NMR spectroscopy. Of notice is the result that proves that the singular carbon atom in the thermodynamic isomer of [C2B10H13](-) is definitely part of the cluster and that its connection with the C2B3 face would be better defined by adding additional interactions with the two boron atoms nearest to the second cluster carbon. The p K a values of the nido species have been calculated by correlating experimental p K a values and calculated reaction Gibbs energies Delta G(s). Some pK(a) values of importance are -4.6 and + 13.5 for 7,8-[C2B9H13] (1) and 7,8-[C2B9H12](-) (2), respectively.