A scheme estimating the energy of intramolecular hydrogen bonds in diols

The relative energies of conformers of 1,2-ethanediol, 1,3-propanediol, and 1,4-butanediol are split into a sum of five different terms including the intramolecular OH?O interaction. This scheme allows to estimate the energy of the O-H?O intramolecular hydrogen bond of the tGG′g and gGG′g conformers of 1,3-propanediol, the g′GG′Gt and g′GG′Gg conformers of 1,4-butanediol, and the energy of the non-bonded O-H?O interaction in the g′Gt, g′Gg and g′Gg′ conformers of 1,2-ethanediol. This scheme provides pure hydrogen bond energies without assuming the geometry and/or electronic features to be constant between the conformation having a IHB and a reference conformation. The fitted energies show a perfect linear correlation with the corresponding r(H?O)⁻¹ values. QTAIM atomic electron population and energies of the donor hydrogen calculated along the H-O-C-C internal rotation are found to be linearly correlated. These linear correlations display small changes at the BCP formation in 1,3-propanediol.