DIELECTRIC CONSTANT OF HYDROGEN-BONDED LIQUIDS.

The principal goal of the project was to measure the dielectric constant of representative classes of hydrogenbonded liquids and to assess the influence of molecular structure size and shape of the side chain group on intermolecular hydrogen-bond formation. Thirty-five compounds, representative of several classes of simple hydrogen-bonded liquids, were investigated. Measurements quantitatively confirmed the intuitive conclusion that the extent of intermolecular, linear chain hydrogenbond formation is governed largely by an entropy effect, and that the size, and particularly the shape, of the molecule is the most important specific variable in the intermolecular association process. An added attraction of dielectric measurements is that they provide the possibility of obtaining information about the rate of dipolar reorientation from a study of dielectric relaxation.