The Bond-Valence Substituent Index for Predicting the Boiling Temperatures of Aliphatic Hydrocarbons

Abstract

A simple molecular descriptor based on molecular structure for predicting the boiling temperature (BT) of alkanes was developed in this paper. This topological index was used to correlate the boiling temperature of aliphatic hydrocarbons with their bond-valence substituent structure instead of by atom-to-atom branching framework. The predictive power of the bond-valence substituent index (BVSI) was evaluated by comparing it with the popular predictor in literature, the Randic index and the more recently proposed index, the Fi of Manso et al. (2012). The model developed through a second order regression of the plot of the alkane’s boiling temperature versus the BVSI index proved successful in its predictive power such that the method was also applied to a combination of aliphatic hydrocarbons, the alkanes, alkenes, alkynes and cycloalkanes. This topological index provided higher correlation with small deviations compared to the topological index used for comparison. A further study of the BVSI index can be explored for other organic compounds with different functional groups and other physical properties besides their boiling temperatures in the future.