Abstract: Urea and its derivatives have a long history of applications in chemistry, agriculture and medicine. The aryl urea derivative, which plays a crucial role in medicinal fields and chemistry as intermediates. The title compound, 3-tert-butyl-1-(3-hydroxyphenyl)urea was synthesized by amidation and oxygenation two-step reaction, and it's single crystal was obtained by solvent evaporation at room temperature. The crystal stacking and the mode of intermolecular interaction were analyzed and the structure was confirmed by ¹H NMR, FT-IR, ¹³C NMR, MS and X-ray single crystal diffraction. In addition, the optimal structure and frontier orbital energy were calculated through the density functional theory (DFT) by using B3LYP method with the 6-311+G(2d, p) basis set and the molecular structure of the crystal was compared with the theoretical calculation. The result indicates that the crystal structure by the X-ray diffraction is very close to the molecular structure optimized by DFT. What's more, the crystal structure of 1 shows that the intermolecular packing is stabilized by hydrogen bondings and the vander Waals forces, and hydrogen bonding is one of the vital factors in the crystal stability. The crystals of 3-tert-butyl-1-(3-hydroxyphenyl)urea belong to the monorhombic system with space group is P2₁/n and the cell parameters are a=1.181 42(6) nm, b=1.762 00(8) nm, c=1.179 02(5) nm, Z=8.

Key words: 3-tert-butyl-1-(3-hydroxyphenyl)urea, solvent evaporation, crystal structure, density functional theory