Solvent Selection. In determining the phase diagram of the maleic acid-caffeine system the choice of solvent is an important variable. In this study, we investigated five solvents: methanol, ethanol, acetone, water, and chloroform. It is preferable to find a solvent in which both components have similar, measurable solubilities. Thus, we were looking for a solvent that would allow us to use a gravimetric method for solubility measurement and which would avoid extreme asymmetry in the ternary diagram. Unfortunately, the solubilities of maleic acid and caffeine show, not surprisingly, large differences in all solvents as seen in Table 1 ; the dicarboxylic acid is soluble in polar solvents while caffeine is not. In their studies of caffeine-dicarboxylic acid cocrystals, Trask et al. (presumably) avoided this problem by use of
chloroform/methanol mixtures having ratios from 30:1 to 3.5:1. Crystallization was then induced either by evaporation or the addition of hexane as an antisolvent. We decided to avoid such two and three component solvent mixtures in our work and hence selected acetone as the solvent of choice, it offering the closest solubility of the components of the solvents tested. We then proceeded to check that we could make the known 1:1 and 2:1 cocrystal phases from acetone solutions.