Eur. Phys. J. E (2015) 38: 5
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2015-15005-8

Regular Article

H-bonding network in fully deuterated N-methylformamide-water mixtures as studied by neutron scattering. Complementarity to X-ray study

¹ Laboratoire Physico-Chimie des Matériaux, Département de Physique, Faculté des Sciences de Monastir, Tunis, 5000, Tunisie
² Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences, Jazan University, Jazan, KSA
³ Laboratoire de Spectroscopie Atomique, Moléculaire et Applications, Département de Physique, Faculté des Sciences, Université de Tunis El Manar, 1060, Tunis, Tunisia
⁴ Laboratoire Léon Brillouin, CEA-Saclay, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France

^* e-mail: salah_nasr1@yahoo.fr

Received: 6 November 2014
Revised: 6 December 2014
Accepted: 22 December 2014
Published online: 29 January 2015

Abstract

In complementarity with X-ray scattering and as extension of our previous publication, neutron scattering measurements are combined to DFT calculation to investigate the structural features of N-methylformamide-water mixtures (NMF-water) for three water molar fractions x _w = 0.5 , 0.66 and x _w = 0.75 . The recorded data at atmospheric pressure and room temperature are analyzed to yield the structure factor, the molecular form factor and the pair correlation function. Neutron investigations corroborate the X-ray ones and clearly show that liquid order in solutions is well accounted for by a tetramer. In this cluster, an NMF molecule is connected to three water molecules by one N-D ^... O and two O-D ^... O hydrogen bonds.