Vibrational Spectroscopic Studies of Cocrystals and Salts. 3. Cocrystal Products Formed by Benzenecarboxylic Acids and Their Sodium Salts

X-ray powder diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry, infrared absorption spectroscopy. and Raman spectroscopy have been used to study the phenomenon of salt formation in four benzenecarboxylic acids (benzoic acid. phenylacetic acid, hydrocinnamic acid, and 4-phenylbutanoic acid), and in the 1:1 stoichiometric products formed by the cocrystallization of a free acid and a sodium salt. Assignments were derived for the observed peaks in both infrared absorption and Raman spectra of the reactants and their products. In all instances, it was observed that the energy of the antisymmetric stretching mode of the carbonyl group of the free benzenecarboxylic acid invariably shifted to higher energies when that acid formed a cocrystal with a sodium salt of another benzenecarboxylic acid. In addition, the symmetric stretching mode of the benzenecarboxylic acid carbonyl group disappeared in the Raman spectrum of its sodium salt and was also absent in the Raman spectrum of the cocrystal product. It was also found that the antisymmetric carboxylate anion stretching mode, the symmetric carboxylate anion stretching mode, the out-of-plane carboxylate deformation mode, and the vibrational modes associated with the phenyl ring and alkane side chains were not useful spectroscopic tools to differentiate cocrystal and sodium salt, as the observed differences of these vibrational modes did not exhibit significantly consistent differences between the various forms.