H-bond and conformations of donors and acceptors in model polyether based polyurethanes

The molecular mechanics (MM) method with COMPASS force field was used to study the H-bonds in the polyether based polyurethane model molecules. Availability of the calculation was firstly verified in comparison of some H-bonded model molecules, which were studied by using ab initio calculation, and those calculated by MM. Based on a urethane model molecule 1,3-dimethylcarbamate, which can be donor or acceptor and behaves in various conformations, it is reasonable to have a large number of H-bond interactions between various conformational donors and acceptors. For examining all the possible interaction patterns, we studied 57H-bond complexes. This systematic modeling covers well-known four types of interaction patterns, such as NH⋯OC (Type I), NH⋯O–CO (Type II), NH⋯NH (Type III), NH⋯COC (Type IV) in the system. Obtained H-bond energies were used to analyze the probabilities of the complexes. For the interaction within the hard segments, or Type I, Type II and Type III, a predominant H-bond complex has been found in the present study, which belongs to Type I. For the interaction between the hard segment and the soft segment, two conformations of Type IV were calculated to be existed.