The
vapor pressures of 52 compounds including n-alkanes
and their monosubstituted derivatives, as well as chloro-
and alkylbenzenes were determined exploring the gas chromatographic
relative retention time (GLC-RT) technique in its simplest form, that
is, using a single reference standard and neglecting the activity
coefficient effect (GLC-RT1S). The selection of compounds was limited
to those which are in the liquid state under the measurement conditions
and for which high-quality vapor pressures obtained by direct methods
are available at temperatures of GLC measurements. This approach should
eliminate possible secondary error sources (such as data extrapolation
or recalculation from supercooled liquid to solid phase or vice versa). On the basis of a thorough comparison of the
GLC-RT1S-based and directly measured vapor pressures for the group
of (functionalized) n-alkanes and by exploiting n-alkanes as reference solutes it is clear that deviations
from direct data are significant (in many tens of percent) when single
reference compounds are used. However, when an n-alkane
that has a retention time lower than the test compound but close to
it is used as the reference, the relative errors do not exceed 20%.
Overall, the method has been found to be rather reliable over a wide
range of conditions for nonpolar and slightly polar substances. For
polar compounds, such as alcohols or nitriles, the results do confirm
the need to carefully select standards with the same functionality
as the targets to be evaluated. In contrast to homologous series no
regular pattern can be observed for functionalized benzenes even if
the reference compounds were selected from the same group of substituted
benzenes.