Cosolute Interactions on Aqueous Contaminant Concentrations

Abstract Information on the aqueous solubilities of organic substances are important for understanding hydrophobic interactions in water and for assessing the distribution and toxicity of contaminants in aquatic environments. Environmental contaminants are frequently encountered as mixtures, and the behaviour of a compound in a mixture may not correspond to that predicted from the pure compounds data. In this study, solutions often binary aromatic mixtures were examined, each at several molar ratios. The five individual aromatics were benzene, 2-chlorotoluene, 2-sec-butylphenol, aniline, and 2-nitroanisole. The water solubilities of those individual compounds range from about 400 to about 40,000 mg/l. For all these binary systems, the experimental results indicate that there are significant cosolute interactions on aqueous contaminant concentrations which appear dependent on the structures of the cosolutes. The UNIFAC model and an empirical QSAR (not given) model are used for the prediction and the correl...