A Charge-Transfer Salt Based on Ferrocene/Ferrocenium Pairs and Keggin-Type Polyoxometalates

Abstract

A new hybrid inorganic-organometallic salt has been obtained from the reaction of the Keggin-type silicotungstate anion with ferrocene in a water/methanol mixture as a result of the partial oxidation of ferrocene molecules to ferrocenium cations. Single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis reveals the presence of four ferrocenium (Fe-III) cations and one ferrocene (Fe-II) molecule per plenary Keggin anion in the crystal structure of [Fe-III (Cp)(2)](4)[SiW12O40]center dot[Fe-II(Cp)(2)]2CH(3)OH (1). Compound 1 thus constitutes the first example in the literature in which ferrocenium and ferrocene species coexist in the structure of a polyoxometalate-based salt. The two crystallographically independent ferrocenium species in the asymmetric unit of 1 exhibit different configurations: One displays an eclipsed conformation with ideal D-5h symmetry, whereas the conformation in the other one is staggered D-5d. The crystal packing of 1 can be best described as an organometallic sub-lattice of ferrocenium and ferrocene species linked by a network of - interactions that generates rectangular cavities of about 14 x 10 angstrom in which strings of Keggin anions and methanol molecules are hosted, further connected to each other via weak OPOMCMeOH-OMeOHOPOM type hydrogen bonds. The charge-transfer nature of the salt has been studied by solid-state diffuse reflectance UV-Vis spectroscopy and the presence of magnetically isolated Fe-III/Fe-II centres has been confirmed by Mossbauer spectroscopy. A topological study carried out on all of the pristine ferrocenyl species deposited in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) has allowed two main conclusions to be drawn: (1) these species tend to adopt extreme conformations (either eclipsed or staggered) with less than a 15% of examples showing intermediate states and (2) the oxidation state of the iron centres can be unequivocally assigned on the basis of a close inspection of the FeCp distances, which allows ferrocene neutral molecules and ferrocenium cations to be easily distinguished.