Hydrogen bonds and van der Waals forces as tools for the construction of a herringbone pattern in the crystal structure of hexane-1,6-diaminium hexane-1,6-diyl bis­(hydrogen phospho­nate)

The asymmetric unit of the title salt, [H3N(CH2)6NH3][(HO)O2P(CH2)6PO2(OH)], consists of one half of a hexane-1,6-diaminium dication and one half of a hexane-1,6-diyl bis-(hydrogen phospho-nate) dianion. Both are located around different centres of inversion (Wyckoff sites: 2a and 2d) of the space group P21/c. The shape of the hexane-1,6-diaminium cation is best described as a double hook. Both aminium groups as well as the two attached CH2 groups are turned out from the plane of the central four C atoms. In contrast, all six C atoms of the dianion are almost in a plane. The hydrogen phospho-nate (-PO3H) groups of the anions and the aminium groups of the cations form two-dimensional O-H⋯ and O-H⋯N hydrogen-bonded networks parallel to the ac plane, built up from ten-membered and twelve-membered ring motifs with graph-set descriptors R33(10) and R54(12), respectively. These networks are linked by the alkyl-ene chains of the anions and cations. The resulting three-dimensional network shows a herringbone pattern, which resembles the parent structures 1,6-di-amino-hexane and hexane-1,6-di-phospho-nic acid.