Estimations of Octanol Solubility, Vapor Pressure, Octanol-air Partition Coefficient, and Air-water Partition Coefficient

Abstract

The United States Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 to control, limit, and regulate pollutant entry into the environment. The primary sources of pollutants are motor vehicle emissions, chemical plants, production factories, land fills, and natural or man-made catastrophes. Persistent organic pollutants have been known to cause such aliments as cancer, respiratory disease, and birth defects. These compounds can also cause irreversible environmental effects such as ozone depletion.The amounts of pollutants in air, water, soil, and organic matter can be correlated with the octanol solubility, vapor pressure, octanol-air partition coefficient, and air-water partition coefficient. The estimation of physical properties plays an important role in understanding the fate of organic pollutants. Although it is more desirable to measure such properties, their estimations can be of great importance in conserving resources and minimizing exposure.In this dissertation new equations for the estimation of these properties are generated. This is accomplished without the use of fitted parameters or regression analysis. The only experimental input parameters are the transition temperatures. The transition properties were estimated from molecular structure. The average absolute errors for the estimated properties are less than one log unit from the experimental values.