Theoretical studies on the pK~a~ values of perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Computational studies were conducted using the major levels of semiempirical, ab initio, density functional theory (DFT), and the CBS-Q//B3 method and various solvation models on a homologous series of straight chain perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (PFCAs) ranging in chain length from C~1~ (trifluoroacetic acid) to C~9~ (n-perfluorodecanoic acid) as well as the monomethyl branched C~7~ (n-perfluorooctanoic acid; n-PFOA) isomers. Regardless of perfluoroalkyl chain length and theoretical method employed, application of a computational thermodynamic cycle indicated no significant change in the estimated aqueous monomeric pK~a~ values between C~1~ and C~9~, all having a relatively constant pK~a~ of about 0 that is in agreement with earlier predictions and recent experimental evidence. Perfluoroalkyl chain helicity does not appear to result in increased monomeric PFCA pK~a~ values at chain lengths greater than 5. Increasing chain length does not substantially influence the structural or electronic character of the carboxylic acid head group. A MMFF94 conformational search yielded 2915 separate low- through high-energy conformers of n-PFOA. Ranking of these structures gave the 94 lowest MMFF94 energy conformations that were subjected to DFT investigations. Application of a thermodynamic cycle approach, coupled with aqueous and gas phase DFT calculations on the molecular and anionic forms for each of the conformers, gave conformationally averaged pK~a~ values for n-PFOA equal to the global minimum helical conformer pK~a~. The conformational populations under study occupy about 100 percent of the global n-PFOA conformational space, indicating no higher energy/low acidity conformations remain unexamined that could influence the predicted composite aqueous monomeric pK~a~ of zero for this compound.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it