• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.34 no.12
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• pp.3591-3596
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• 2013

The enantioselective aza-Morita Baylis Hillman reaction of nitroalkene and N-tosylimine catalyzed by thiourea-tertiary amine has been investigated using density functional theory. Enantioselectivity is dominated by the cooperative effect of non-covalent and weak covalent interactions imposed by different units of catalyst. As Lewis base, the tertiary amine unit activates nitroalkene via weak covalent bond. The weak covalent interaction orients the reaction in a major path with smaller variations of this bond. The aromatic ring unit activates N-tosylimine via ${\pi}-{\pi}$ stacking. The non-covalent interaction selects the major path with smaller changes of the efficient packing areas. Thiourea unit donates more compact H-bonded network for species of the major path. The calculated ee value in xylene solution phase (97.6%) is much higher than that in N,N-Dimethylformamide (27.2%). Our conclusion is also supported by NBO analysis.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.63 no.1
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• pp.24-28
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• 2019

In this work, we discuss where the failure of Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory (DFT) occurs in weak interactions. We have adopted density-corrected density functional calculations and dispersion correction separately to find out whether the failure is due to density-driven error or functional error. The results of Benzene Ar complex, one of the most common examples of van der Waals interactions, show that DFT calculations of van der Waals interaction suffer from functional error, rather than density-driven error. In addition, errors in DFT calculations of the S22 dataset, which contains small to relatively large (30 atoms) complexes with non-covalent interactions, are governed by functional errors.