Sorption equilibrium of a wide spectrum of organic vapors in Leonardite humic acid: modeling of experimental data.

In a recent publication we presented experimental Leonardite humic acid/air partition coefficients for 188 polar and nonpolar organic compounds measured with one consistent method. In this paper these experimental data are evaluated with various model predictions. For the PcKocWIN model some major shortcomings become apparent. The octanol-based Karickhoff-model exhibits a good performance for the nonpolar compounds but not for the polar ones. A good description of the whole data set is achieved with a polyparameter linear free energy relationship (pp-LFER) that explicitly accounts for the nonpolar (van der Waals and cavity formation) and polar (electron donor/acceptor) interactions between the sorbate molecule and the sorbent phase. With this pp-LFER model, most of the humic acid/air partition coefficients could be predicted within a factor of 2. The pp-LFER model also successfully predicts organic-C/water partition coefficients (K(ioc)) collected from the literature when it is combined with a pp-LFER for air/water partition coefficients. This supports our earlier conclusion that the thermodynamic cycle is applicable in the humic acid/water/air system. Based on our experimental data, we present a pp-LFER-model for humic acid/air and humic acid/water partitioning at any ambient temperatures.