Density functional calculations of 9-diphenylaminoacridine fluorescent indicator and its interactions with analyte molecules: I. Structures of complexes in the ground electronic states and absorption spectra

The interaction of 9-diphenylaminoacridine dye (indicator) with several small analyte molecules (methanol, acetonitrile, acetone, tetrahydrofuran, benzene, ammonia, formaldehyde, and acetaldehyde) has been theoretically studied in relation to the problem of the development of optical chemosensors based on organic dyes. The structures of the resulting complexes and the absorption spectra of 9-diphenylaminoacridine and its complexes with analytes were calculated using density functional theory (DFT) with the PBE0 functional and the 6-31G(d,p) basis set. It was demonstrated that complexes of two types with different mutual arrangements of molecules corresponding to the lateral and stacking structures can be formed for each analyte. The calculated absorption spectrum only weakly changes upon complex formation, which is in agreement with experimental data on the absorption spectra of 2,7-dimethyl-9-ditolylaminoacridine in solutions of corresponding solvents. The method for the calculation of excited states that was used in this work can be applied to the calculation of the fluorescence spectra of 9-diphenylaminoacridine complexes.