Partition coefficient sorption

Swann R, Laskowski D, McCAll P, et al. 1983. A rapid method for the estimation of the environmental parameters octanol/water partition coefficient, soil sorption constant, water to air ratio, and water solubility. Residue Rev 85 18-28. 

Sorption. Capture of neutral organics by non-living particulates depends on the organic carbon content of the solids (9). Equilibrium sorption of such "hydrophobic" compounds can be described by a carbon-normalized partition coefficient on both a whole-sediment basis and by particle size classes. The success of the whole-sediment approach derives from the fact that most natural sediment organic matter falls in the "silt" or "fine" particle size fractions. So long as dissolved concentrations do not exceed 0.01 mM, linear isotherms (partition coefficients) can be used. At higher concentrations, the sorptive capacity of the solid can be exceeded, and a nonlinear Freundlich or Langmuir isotherm must be invoked. 

The binding constants of a number of compounds were measured using dialysis, solubility and sorption techniques. The solubility technique was used for compounds which were not radiolabeled. All data was collected at pH = 8.3. The binding constants were then compared to the octanol/water partition coefficients for the compounds and the molar solubilities of the compounds. The data is presented in Table II. The Kow values were taken from the literature.18 22-2 The solubility values were determined in this research with the exception of DDT and Lindane, which were taken from the literature. A plot of log Kc vs. log Kow is presented in Figure 5. The slope of this line is 0.71, the intercept is 0.75 and the value of the correlation coefficient is 0.9258. The regression is highly significant... 

The data presented here indicates that the extent of binding for a particular compound is related to the octanol/water partition coefficient for that compound. This is very similar to the sorption of compounds from water to sediment. Compounds with log Kow values less than four (such as Lindane) will probably not be bound to an appreciable extent in the environment. Compounds with very high log Kow values (DDT and DEHP) may be bound to a significant extent. The extent of binding will depend on both the concentration of humic material and on the nature of the humic material. The humic materials used in this research showed dramatically different affinities for DDT. The reasons for this are poorly understood and deserve further study. 

In lc there are other sorption mechanisms that can cause separation, depending on whether we choose to use a liquid or a solid as the stationary phase, or what kind of solid we use. Liquid-liquid chromatography (11c) uses a liquid stationary phase coated onto a finely divided inert solid support. Separation here is due to differences in the partition coefficients of solutes between the stationary liquid and the liquid mobile phase. In normal phase 11c the stationary phase is relatively polar and the mobile phase relatively non-polar, whilst... 

Another feature of the process is that the sorption capacity of type II organoclays is inversely related to the aqueous solubility of the NOCs (Chiou 1989). For example, the affinity of HDTMA-smectite for various phenols increases in the order phenol < chlorophenol < dichlorophenol < trichlorophenol since phenol is the most water-soluble while trichlorophe-nol is the most hydrophobic (Mortland et al. 1986, Lo et al. 1998). The relationship between the distribution (partition) coefficient in a type II organoclay and water-solubility is illustrated in Fig. 5 for a range of nonionic organic pollutants. 

KoC is an important parameter which describes the potential for movement or mobility of pesticides in soil, sediment and groundwater. Because of the structural complexity of these agrochemical molecules, the above simple relationship which considers only the chemical s hydrophobicity may fail for polar and ionic compounds. The effects of pH, soil properties, mineral surfaces and other factors influencing sorption become important. Other quantities, KD (sorption partition coefficient to the whole soil on a dry weight basis) and KqM (organic matter-water partition coefficient) are also commonly used to describe the extent of sorption. K0M is often estimated as 0.56 KoC, implying that organic matter is 56% carbon. 

There is a continuing effort to extend the long-established concept of quantitative-structure-activity-relationships (QSARs) to quantitative-structure-property relationships (QSPRs) to compute all relevant environmental physical-chemical properties (such as aqueous solubility, vapor pressure, octanol-water partition coefficient, Henry s law constant, bioconcentration factor (BCF), sorption coefficient and environmental reaction rate constants from molecular structure). 

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