Determination of Fragility in Organic Small Molecular Glass Forming Liquids: Comparison of Calorimetric and Spectroscopic Data and Commentary on Pharmaceutical Importance.

Abstract

The fragility index ( m) and conversely the strength parameter ( D) are widely used to categorize glass forming liquids and are used to characterize temperature dependency of viscosity and relaxation time as the supercooled liquid approaches glass transition. The currently used calorimetric methods in pharmaceutical literature lead to wide variability in measured values of m. In this work, a modulated differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) method is introduced that can directly determine m with minimal variability. Although calorimetric fragility is easy to measure due to availability and ease of use of DSC, there is no correlation between calorimetric and dielectric fragility (calculated spectroscopically from relaxation times). In addition, there is also no correlation between calorimetric fragility and the so-called "thermodynamic fragility" that can be calculated using only thermodynamic parameters. No relationship can be found between the crystallization propensity in the supercooled liquid state and D. However, the crystallization propensity shows a reasonable correlation with the Kohlrausch distribution parameter βk, which defines the breadth of the relaxation time distribution.