Temperature Effect on the Monolayer Formation of Substituted Alkanes at the Air/Water Interface: A Quantum Chemical Approach

Abstract

An approach to calculation of the threshold temperature for spontaneous clusterization of substituted alkanes (amines, nitriles, alcohols, thioalcohols, saturated and unsaturated carboxylic acids, α-amino acids, carboxylic acid amides, and melamine derivatives) at the air/water interface with dependence on the alkyl chain length was developed. In the framework of this approach, four schemes for the description of the temperature dependencies of the thermodynamic parameters of clusterization of the concerned amphiphilic compounds were proposed. They use the data obtained previously in the framework of quantum chemical semiempirical PM3 method and differ from each other by the degree of their theoretical accuracy. It was shown that the threshold temperature for spontaneous clusterization of the regarded classes of substituted alkanes can be described using a fractionally linear function in dependence on the alkyl chain length. It was found that, in agreement with the presented experimental data, the effect of the alkyl chain elongation of the substituted alkanes by two methylene units correlates with the decrease of the subphase temperature (ΔT) by 10-20 K. The general shape of the obtained dependencies indicates that the difference in the ΔT values for the amphiphilic molecules decreases with increasing alkyl chain length. This implies that the contribution of the intermolecular CH···HC interactions between the alkyl chains of monolayer molecules should be a decisive factor.