DFT investigation on dihydrogen-bonded amine-borane complexes

The DFT method has been employed in the exploration on dihydrogen-bonded amine-borane complexes, with a special emphasis on the dimerization and substituent group effect. Stable dihydrogen bonded complexes can be generated from these amine-borane monomers with the appearance of NHδ+…Hδ-B interactions. The binding energy decreases gradually with the increase of the steric effect of the substituents. The substituent group number mainly varies the C-N bond length. The dimerization generates close H…H and influences predominantly the N-B distance. The effect of dimerization on IR and vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) spectra is stronger than that of the number of substituent groups, which leads to distinct NBO charge variation on α-C. Both the substituent group number and dimerization enhance the chemical shift difference between hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to N and B, ΔδH-H, which can be hired as an index for structural determination. It is proposed that amine-borane complexes with more substituent groups in higher degree of polymerization are potentially interesting materials for hydrogen storage.