A 35-year-old mystery solved: a facile synthetic route and structural confirmation of tetrachlorobis(diethyl ether)tungsten(IV)

Abstract

The true identity of the diethyl ether adduct of tungsten(IV) chloride, WCl4(Et2O) x , has been in doubt since 1985. Initially postulated as the bis-adduct, WCl4(Et2O)2, questions arose when elemental analyses were more in line with a mono-ether adduct, viz. WCl4(Et2O). It was proposed that this was due to the thermal instability of the bis-adduct. Here, we report the room-temperature X-ray crystal structure and Hirshfeld surface characteristics of trans-tetrachloridobis(diethyl ether)tungsten(IV), trans-WCl4(Et2O)2 or trans-[WCl4(C4H10O)2]. The compound crystallizes, with half of the molecule in the asymmetric unit, in the centrosymmetric space group P21/n. The W—O distance is 2.070 (2) Å, while the W—Cl distances are 2.3586 (10) and 2.3554 (10) Å.