Abstract:

Octanol-air partition coefficient (Koa) is a key descriptor for describing the partitioning of organic pollutants, especially persistent organic pollutants (POPs), between air and environmental organic phases. Thus it is necessary to determine or predict the Koa values of these compounds. A novel method was introduced to describe the quantitive relationship between the octanol-air partition coefficients and gas chromatographic (GC) retention parameters A, B values of polychlorinated diphenyls (PCBs ) which are typical persistent organic pollutants. By the correlation analysis between GC retention parameters A, B values of PCBs on DB-1, DB-5 and DB-1701 columns, and their octanol-air partition coefficients, a good linear relationship was found. The stepwise multiple linear regression was used to derive binary equations with the correlation coefficients greater than 0.99, and the standard deviations are less than 0.11. In addition, based on the 153 experimental A, B values and 56 predicted A, B values, the Koa values of the remaining 190 PCBs were predicted.

Key words: octanol-air partition coefficients (Koa), polychlorinated biphenyls , gas chromatographic retention parameters