Journal of Physical Chemistry A, Vol.112, No.17, 3870-3878, 2008
Interaction in the ternary complexes of HCl-methanol-X, X = H2O or NH3 : Ab initio calculations and on-the-fly molecular dynamics
Dynamics, structures, energetics, and vibrational spectra of the ternary complexes of hydrogen chloride with either methanol and water or methanol and ammonia were investigated by on-the-fly molecular dynamics and ab initio and density functional theory (DFT) with aug-cc-pvDZ basis sets. Addition of CH3OH to the HCl-NH3 system catalyzes the proton transfer from HCl to NH3. However, the dynamics of the system show that the proton is not localized on NH3; rather, it is shared between N and Cl.