Anaerobic biodegradability of aliphatic compounds and their quantitative structure biodegradability relationship

In this study, anaerobic biodegradability of 47 kinds of aliphatic compounds was tested and assessed in integrate. These aliphatic compounds were classified into readily, partially and poorly biodegradable compounds after their integrated assessment indices (IAI) were calculated. Some laws of anaerobic biodegradation of aliphatic compounds were drawn. Stepwise regression and back propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN) methods were applied to establish quantitative structure biodegradability relationship (QSBR) based on the assessment results. In QSBR models, six molecular structure descriptors were included. After analyzing the sensitivity of variables in QSBR models, it was found that the key molecular structure descriptors affecting anaerobic biodegradability of aliphatic compounds were total energy (TolE) and molecular diameter (D), which were in direct proportion to the anaerobic biodegradability of aliphatic compounds.