A reliable model for quick prediction of the melting points of acyclic hydrocarbons

Abstract

Acyclic branched or unbranched hydrocarbons are the principal constituents of petroleum and natural gas, which have wide applications as fuels and lubricants as well as raw materials for the production of plastics, rubbers, fibers, solvents, explosives, and industrial chemicals. Since existing estimating methods may provide great deviations for some acyclic hydrocarbons, a simple method is presented for reliable estimation of the melting points of acyclic hydrocarbons containing complex molecular structures. It is based on two independent variables including molecular weight and a correcting melting point term. The reported data of the melting points of 310 acyclic hydrocarbons were collected from various sources for deriving and testing the new method. Internal and external validations as well as the accuracy parameters and applicability domain of the training set are used to check the high consistency of the novel technique. The great consistency of the novel model is compared to the predicted results of the best existing predictive technique where the novel method's Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) value for 310 acyclic hydrocarbons is 10.58, which is greatly fewer than the comparative method, i.e. 15.15.