Solvent Acidity and Basicity Scales: Analysis of Catalan’s SB and SA Scales and Gutmann’s Acceptor Number and Comparison with Kamlet and Taft’s β and α Solvent Scales, Gutmann’s Donor Number and Abraham’s B and A Solute Scales

The use of experimental parameters to quantify solvent properties, for example in linear free energy relationships, is well established and several scales of solvent acidity, basicity and polarity/polarizability have been developed. The success of this approach raises questions of which molecular properties contribute to particular solvent parameters and whether these contributions are found in all parameters representing a particular solvent property. In the present study, Catalan’s hydrogen bond basicity and acidity parameters, SB and SA, and Gutmann’s acceptor number, AN, a measure of a solvent’s Lewis acidity, are correlated with molecular properties derived from computational chemistry. The results are compared with the results of similar correlations with Kamlet and Taft’s β and α Solvent Scales, Gutmann’s donor number DN) and Abraham’s B and A solute scales. The results show that measures of solvent basicity, SB, β and DN all correlate strongly with the partial charge on the most negative atom in the solvent molecule and the energy of the donor orbital and, in all cases, the parameter values for hydrogen-bonded solvents are anomalous. Abraham’s B, a measure of solute hydrogen basicity, depends only on the partial charge on the most negative atom and there is no anomaly in the values for solutes that, in the pure state, form hydrogen-bonded liquids. Similarly, all measures of solvent acidity, SA, α and AN, and Abraham’s A, a measure of solute hydrogen bond acidity, depend on the partial charge on the most positive hydrogen on the molecule.