(664b) Current State of Thermophysical Property Measurements and Reporting in Scientific Publications

Experimental thermophysical and thermochemical property data for chemical substances, mixtures, and materials are needed in various fields, such as chemical engineering, design of new processes and products, development of predictions/correlations, and education. Two factors are critical for addressing the above needs: availability and quality. Depending on their quality, the data can be useful or misleading.

While the amount of published thermophysical data constantly increases and their searchability improves, the reliability of the data in each case requires exploration. A set of methods and tools for data quality analysis is used at the NIST Thermodynamics Research Center (TRC) [1]. Application of those methods reveals the extent of inconsistencies and provides statistical information. For the journals cooperating with NIST/TRC for data validation, we apply our checks to accepted manuscripts and can compare their state before and after interaction with TRC. The aspects we consider are completeness of data reporting, physical/thermodynamic validity of data, and numerical representation of data. A significant part (up to 50%) of manuscripts has fixable problems such as incomplete reporting, ambiguities in identification of substances and properties, and typographical errors. Non-fixable problems such as flaws in technique, non-physical or inconsistent values are also frequently observed. The statistics of both will be provided in the presentation. While problems detected during the journal cooperation process are typically fixed after TRC provides a data report to the journals prior to publication, the rate of data problems in other journals is generally higher. Hence, no published property value can be blindly used without expert evaluation.

Part of TRC’s activities are dedicated to improvement of the interaction with the cooperating journals. The experience gained in that process is used more broadly with the intent to increase the efficiency of thermophysical research and better serve the needs of data users. An element of those activities is the Good Reporting Practice initiative. Other planned actions will be dedicated to assisting reviewers and experimentalists with a goal to obtain more reliable results from different kinds of measurements.

This presentation will provide the statistics in more details, including an analysis of possible causes of the observed measurement and publication mistakes. It will also mention a potential effect of data errors on process simulation.

[1] Vladimir Diky, Ala Bazyleva, Eugene Paulechka, Joseph W. Magee, Vikina Martinez, Demian Riccardi, Kenneth Kroenlein. Validation of thermophysical data for scientific and engineering applications. J. Chem. Thermodyn, 2019, 133, 208-222.

*Corresponding author: Email: ala.bazyleva@nist.gov; Phone: +1-303-497-5981