Group additivity values for entropy and heat capacities of C₂–C₈ alkanes, alkyl hydroperoxides, and their radicals

Group additivity values for the thermodynamic properties of oxygenated radicals are poorly determined due to the absence of high quality reference data. Here, a set of 58 group additive values (GAV) for the standard entropy and heat capacity of relevance to alkane oxidation is derived from fits to an extensive and accurate database of standard entropies (298.15 K) and heat capacities (300–3000 K) recently calculated with the “STAR-1D” formalism. The 192 species in this database represent the alkanes (RH), alkyl radicals (Ṙ), alkyl hydroperoxides (RO₂H), alkyl-peroxy (RȮ₂) and hydroperoxy-alkyl (Q˙OOH) radicals for all of the isomers of C₂–C₅ alkane fuels and a select number of isomers of C₆–C₉ species. The STAR-1D thermochemical data for this set of species was previously obtained from a coupling of scaled B2PLYPD3/cc-pVTZ vibrational analyses with scaled ωB97X-D/cc-pVTZ one-dimensional hindered rotor corrections. The 2σ uncertainties in the GAV results relative to the STAR-1D data set are 2.4 cal K^–1 mol^–1 for the entropies and at most 2.0 cal K^–1 mol^–1 for the heat capacities in the temperature range 500–800 K. The 2σ fitting uncertainties in the heat capacity gradually reduce at higher temperatures reaching a value of 0.8 cal K^–1 mol^–1 at 2000 K decreasing to only 0.5 cal K^–1 mol^–1 at 3000 K. The high degree of accuracy for the GAV representations is obtained through the introduction of various new group terms, together with the re-optimization of existing group terms. Among the full set of 58 GAV terms, 25 include non-next-nearest neighbor interactions (NNI) and β-corrections. The updated GAVs can be applied in the prediction of entropies and heat capacities for a wide range of hydrocarbons and hydroperoxide species and their radicals, which is important to the accurate prediction of fuel reactivity at low-temperatures in the range 600–1000 K.