The Important Role of Lone-Pairs in Force Field (MM4) Calculations on Hydrogen Bonding in Alcohols

An expanded treatment of hydrogen bonding has been developed for MM4 force field calculations, which is an extension from the traditional van der Waals-electrostatic model. It adds explicit hydrogen-bond angularity by the inclusion of lone-pair directionality. The vectors that account for this directionality are placed along the hydrogen acceptor and its chemically intuitive electron pairs. No physical lone-pairs are used in the calculations. Instead, an H-bond angularity function, and a lone-pair directionality function, are incorporated into the hydrogen-bond term. The inclusion of the lone-pair directionality results in improved accuracy in hydrogen-bonded geometries and interaction energies. In this work is described hydrogen bonding in alcohols, and also in water and hydrogen fluoride dimer. The extension to other compounds such as aldehydes, ketones, amides, and so oil is straightforward and will be discussed in future work. The conformational energies of ethylene glycol are discussed.