A Comparative QSPR Study of Alkanes with the Help of Computational Chemistry

The development of a variety of methods like AM1, PM3, PM5 and DFT now allows the calculation of atomic and molecular properties with high precision as well as the treatment of large molecules with predictive power. In this paper, these methods have been used to calculate a number of quantum chemical descriptors (like Klopman atomic softness in terms of $E_n^{\ddag}\;and\;E_m^{\ddag}$, chemical hardness, global softness, electronegativity, chemical potential, electrophilicity index, heat of formation, total energy etc.) for 75 alkanes to predict their boiling point values. The 3D modeling, geometry optimization and semiempirical & DFT calculations of all the alkanes have been made with the help of CAChe software. The calculated quantum chemical descriptors have been correlated with observed boiling point by using multiple linear regression (MLR) analysis. The predicted values of boiling point are very close to the observed values. The values of correlation coefficient ($r^2$) and cross validation coefficient ($r_{cv}^2$) also indicates the generated QSPR models are valuable and the comparison of all the methods indicate that the DFT method is most reliable while the addition of Klopman atomic softness $E_n^{\ddag}$ in DFT method improves the result and provides best correlation.