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12.11: Chemical Shifts and Interpreting ¹³C NMR Spectra

  • Page ID
    45280
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    13C NMR Chemical Shifts

    The Carbon NMR is used for determining functional groups using characteristic shift values. 13C chemical shift is affect by electronegative effect and steric effect. If an H atoms in an alkane is replace by substituent X, electronegative atoms (O, N, halogen), ?-carbon and ?-carbon shift to downfield (left; increase in ppm) while ?-carbon shifts to upfield. The steric effect is observed in acyclic and clyclic system, which leads to downshifted chemical shifts. Figure 9 shows typical 13C chemical shift regions of the major chemical class.

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    Figure 9: 13C Chemical shift range for organic compound

    Spin-Spin splitting

    Comparing the 1H NMR, there is a big difference thing in the 13C NMR. The 13C-13Cspin-spin splitting rarely exit between adjacent carbons because 13C is naturally lower abundant (1.1%)

    • 13C-1H Spin coupling: 13C-1H Spin coupling provides useful information about the number of protons attached a carbon atom. In case of one bond coupling (1JCH), -CH, -CH2, and CH3 have respectively doublet, triplet, quartets for the 13C resonances in the spectrum. However, 13C-1H Spin coupling has an disadvantage for 13C spectrum interpretation. 13C-1H Spin coupling is hard to analyze and reveal structure due to a forest of overlapping peaks that result from 100% abundance of 1H.
    • Decoupling: Decoupling is the process of removing 13C-1H coupling interaction to simplify a spectrum and identify which pair of nuclei is involved in the J coupling. The decoupling 13C spectra shows only one peak(singlet) for each unique carbon in the molecule(Fig 10.). Decoupling is performed by irradiating at the frequency of one proton with continuous low-power RF.

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    Fig 10. Decoupling in the 13C NMR


    12.11: Chemical Shifts and Interpreting ¹³C NMR Spectra is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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