Hydrogen-bond configuration in hydrogen-bond solutions. 1. Alcohol/alcohol solutions

A theory based on the hydrogen-bond configuration is proposed and applied to alcohol/alcohol binary solutions. The theory leads explicit expressions for the mixing Gibbs energy and reproduces the experiments on the crystal-liquid phase-diagrams of pure crystals and co-crystals and mixing heats with the parameters common to these experiments. The mixing entropy arises from the increase in the hydrogen-bonding availability of proton donors to approach hydrogen-bond-free proton acceptors. The mixing heat arises from a balance between the contribution from maintaining the original associations in pure liquids and the contribution from a construction of hydrogen bonds freely to hydrogen-bond-free acceptors. When hydrogen-bond associations between component-1 and component-2 are distinguished statistically from associations in each pure component, we call the solution as a cooperative solution that has at least one stoichiometric cooperative concentration point. Some shorter alcohol/alcohol solutions and some aromatic alcohol/aromatic alcohol solutions, however, have no cooperative point and we call those solutions as the ideal hydrogen-bond solutions of which properties are mainly governed by the ideal-gas-like mixing hydrogen-bond entropy. The hydrogen-bond energies of various combinations of the proton acceptor and the proton donor have been estimated consistently from the fittings of the theory, the shifts by hydrogen bonding of the OH stretching in the Raman or IR spectroscopy, and the sublimation energy of crystals. The present theory reveals the characteristics of hydrogen-bond solutions and gives some predictions. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.