QSPR study of polarographic half-wave reduction potentials of benzenoid hydrocarbons

Correlation between the polarographic half-wave reduction potentials and the set of molecular descriptors of lower benzenoid hydrocarbons was made by the CROMRsel modeling procedure. The following descriptors were used in the modeling procedure: electron affinities, Mickel pi-electron energies, pi-electron energies of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals, the number of Kekule structures and the vertex-connectivity index. All models with one, two or three descriptors were considered. It was found that the pi-electron energies of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals E(LUMO) were participating in all the best models. A single-descriptor model based on E(LUMO) was selected for testing. The statistical parameters obtained for the test set are comparable to those of the training set. The obtained results suggest that energies of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals are indeed very suitable descriptors for predicting the polarographic half-wave reduction potentials of benzenoid hydrocarbons.