Supercooled liquid vapour pressures and related thermodynamic properties of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons determined by gas chromatography.

A gas chromatographic method using Kováts retention indices has been applied to determine the liquid vapour pressure (Pi), enthalpy of vaporization (ΔHi) and difference in heat capacity between gas and liquid phase (ΔCi) for a group of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). This group consists of 19 unsubstituted, methylated and sulphur containing PAHs. Differences in logPi of −0.04 to +0.99 log units at 298.15K were observed between experimental values and data from effusion and gas saturation studies. These differences in logPi have been fitted with multilinear regression resulting in a compound and temperature dependent correction. Over a temperature range from 273.15 to 423.15K, differences in corrected logPi of a training set (−0.07 to +0.03 log units) and a validation set (−0.17 to 0.19 log units) were within calculated error ranges. The corrected vapour pressures also showed a good agreement with other GC determined vapour pressures (average −0.09 log units).