Environmental implications of sulfolane demixing from water by phenolic co-contaminants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sulfolane is a groundwater pollutant used to remove acidic components from petroleum. Phenolic compounds such as phenol, m-cresol, p-cresol and dimethylphenol can be found as co-pollutants because they are present in petroleum. Sulfolane is freely miscible in pure water, but phenolic compounds decrease its miscibility. Depending on the composition of the mixture, either larger droplets or molecular clusters form. Clusters are visible by small angle neutron scattering. Demixing occurs because sulfolane has higher affinity for phenols than water, as evident from activity coefficients estimated by COnductor like Screening MOdel for Realistic Solvents, COSMO-RS. Attenuated total reflectance – Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy reveals interactions between the -OH groups of phenols and the -SO groups of sulfolane. Sulfolane interacts more strongly with phenols than water, as seen by computer simulations. Demixing of sulfolane by phenols leads to entrapment into varying mineral substrates, potentially attenuating its migration in groundwater. It also enables its removal from ternary mixtures by polyurethane sponges, onto which sulfolane alone does not sorb in binary aqueous mixtures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".