Prediction of cosolvent effect on solvation free energies and analysis of intermolecular forces of tizanidine hydrochloride in ethyl acetate plus methanol/ethanol mixtures

The solubility of small molecule drug in solvents can be dramatically affected by addition of a suitable cosolvent, which makes the screening of the best-suited cosolvent an important task for the purification and preparation. The present work aims to improve the fundamental understanding of tizanidine hydrochloride (TIZ HC) solvation by cosolvent. Solubility experimental data from TIZ HCl in mixtures of ethyl acetate + alcohols were obtained at different temperatures with the method of isothermal equilibrium. In the system of ethyl acetate + methanol, the solubility data increased firstly and then decreased with an increase in ethyl acetate content, however, the strictly monotonic decreasing of solubility in ethyl acetate + ethanol mixtures was observed. The solubility correlation fitting was performed with the Jouyban-Acree model and CNIBS/R-K model. The solvent effect analysis indicates that the hydrogen bond acidity, the polarity / polarizability and the cohesive forces of the solvent have a greater influence on the solubility, which was further validated by the local quantitative molecular surface analysis results of electrostatic potential (ESP). The dissolution process of TIZ HCl in systems with different solvent compositions was analyzed in the form of preferential solvation parameters, it was found that methanol is the preferred solvent in the solvation shell of TIZ HCl in methanol-rich and ethyl acetate-rich mixtures but the ethanol is preferred in intermediate compositions and ethyl acetate-rich mixtures. Moreover, the types of intermolecular solute-solvent interactions were discussed on the basis of the structural characteristics of TIZ HCl. The solvation free energy is a key parameter describing solvent effects, which is extremely important for understanding solution chemistry. For this part, with the aid of density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, it was found that the cosolvent effect is consistent with the prediction trend of solvation free energy of TIZ HCl in each systems. The effect of the cavity formed by the solvent molecules and dipole moment of solute was calculated accordingly by the solvation model based on density (SMD) for explaining the former behavior.