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Kinetics and Mechanism of the Thermal Dehydration of a Robust and Yet Metastable Hemihydrate of 4‑Hydroxynicotinic Acid
Hydrates
are the most common type of solvates and certainly the
most important ones for industries such as pharmaceuticals which strongly
rely on the development, production, and marketing of organic molecular
solids. A recent study indicated that, in contrast with thermodynamic
predictions, a new hemihydrate of 4-hydroxynicotinic acid (4HNA·0.5H<sub>2</sub>O) did not undergo facile spontaneous dehydration at ambient
temperature and pressure. The origin of this robustness and the mechanism
of dehydration were investigated in this work, through a combined
approach which involved kinetic studies by thermogravimetry (TGA),
crystal packing analysis based on X-ray diffraction data, and microscopic
observations by hot stage microscopy (HSM), scanning electron microscopy
(SEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The TGA results indicated
that the resilience of 4HNA·0.5H<sub>2</sub>O to water loss is
indeed of kinetic origin, c.f., due to a significant activation energy, <i>E</i><sub>a</sub>, which increased from 85 kJ·mol<sup>–1</sup> to 133 kJ·mol<sup>–1</sup> with the increase in particle
size. This <i>E</i><sub>a</sub> range is compatible with
the fact that four moderately strong hydrogen bonds (typically 20–30
kJ·mol<sup>–1</sup> each) must be broken to remove water
from the crystal lattice. The dehydration kinetics conforms to the
Avrami-Erofeev A2 model, which assumes a nucleation and growth mechanism.
Support for a nucleation and growth mechanism was also provided by
the HSM, SEM, and AFM observations. These observations further suggested
that the reaction involves one-dimensional nucleation, which is rarely
observed. Finally, a statistical analysis of Arrhenius plots for samples
with different particle sizes revealed an isokinetic relationship
between the activation parameters. This is consistent with the fact
that the dehydration mechanism is independent of the sample particle
size