Solid-state NMR and DFT predictions of differences in COOH hydrogen bonding in odd and even numbered n-alkyl fatty acids.

For nearly 140 years n-alkyl monocarboxylic acids have been known to exhibit unusual non-monotonic melting between odd and even numbered acids. This behavior has been rationalized in terms of packing density at the hydrocarbon tails, with COOH hydrogen bonding considered to be invariant among different acids. A recent ambiguity involving the COOH conformation between two crystal structures of lauric acid suggests that COOH structure and hydrogen bonding may play a role in these differences.

Monitoring the refinement of crystal structures with (15)N solid-state NMR shift tensor data.

The (15)N chemical shift tensor is shown to be extremely sensitive to lattice structure and a powerful metric for monitoring density functional theory refinements of crystal structures. These refinements include lattice effects and are applied here to five crystal structures. All structures improve based on a better agreement between experimental and calculated (15)N tensors, with an average improvement of 47.