Determination of methanol partition coefficient in octanol/water system by a three-phase ratio variation headspace gas chromatographic method.

Determining the methanol partition coefficient (K _ow ) in octanol/water system is important to assess the risk of its impact to humans and the environment. In this paper, we report a novel method for the determination of the K _ow of methanol with headspace gas chromatography (HS-GC), using a three-phase equilibrium-based phase ratio variation approach. Three headspace vials with different phase ratios [(1) 0.2 mL of water plus 3 mL of octanol, (2) 1 mL of water plus 3 mL of octanol and (3) 1 mL of water plus 10 mL of octanol] were used in the experiment. After pre-standing at 25 °C for > 10 h and equilibrating in the headspace oven at a temperature of interest for additional 25 min, the methanol signals of the vapor phase (i.e., the headspace) in these vials were measured by HS-GC, from which the K _ow of methanol can be calculated based on the established equations. The results showed that the method has good precision (within 0.06 log unit in standard deviation) and acceptable accuracy (with method error within 0.5 log unit). A correlation between the K _ow of methanol and temperature extrapolated the K _ow values in a temperature range of interest. The present method represents a simple and in-situ approach for the determination of the K _ow of methanol and is also suitable to be applied to other volatile compounds.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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