Incremental binding free energies of aluminum (III) vs. magnesium (II) complexes

A sequential ligand addition to the aluminum (III) cation has been studied using the B3LYP functional and a combined all-electron/pseudopotentials basis set. The aluminum complexes are compared with analogous magnesium (II) complexes. Different thermodynamical data, such as incremental binding energies, enthalpies, entropies and free energies, are presented for these addition reactions. While the magnesium (II) cation can only accommodate three negatively charged ligands, aluminum (III) accommodates four even after including bulk solvent effects. The main differences between both cations complexing with the neutral ligands, is that aluminum (III) is not able to form complexes with methanol until the number of methanol ligands is equal to 3. Magnesium (II) prefers to bind methanol and formamide when the number of ligands is small, while aluminum prefers formamide. For the largest complexes both cations prefer to bind water.