Synthesis and structure determination of molecular cocrystals

Research into cocrystals is just a small field within crystallography, though the significant rise of investigation into cocrystals has made it an exciting area of research. This thesis initially introduces the phenomenon of cocrystals, including the design, formation, structure solution and the properties of cocrystals. This thesis presents a number of new multi-component crystalline adducts that have been synthesised using dicarboxylic acids as coformers with isonicotinamide, nicotinamide or adenine. The first results chapter discusses a number of molecular adducts that contain distinct hydrogen bonding networks and includes the discovery of a new polymorph and the potential of adenine to tautomerise. The following two results chapters focus on molecular structures of nicotinamide and isonicotinamide with the dicarboxylic acids in which trends in crystal packing, cocrystal property studies and twisting of the acid backbone are discussed in detail. In conjunction with the crystal structure and property studies, several powder X-ray diffraction datasets were collected from a synchrotron source. The final results chapter shows that a cocrystal structure, such as nicotinamide : succinic acid, can be solved without the need of single crystal X-ray diffraction data.