A simple, physically intuitive alternative for fitting temperature-dependent kinetic data

Abstract

A new “global Arrhenius” approach for fitting temperature-dependent data, inspired by a dynamical Maxwell relation, is introduced as an alternative to the widely used Vogel–Fulcher–Tammann (VFT) and Arrhenius equations. The proposed form is general and provides a thermodynamically motivated description of temperature dependence in which all the parameters have a clear physical interpretation. To illustrate its utility, it is applied to temperature-dependent kinetic data, including diffusion coefficients, viscosity, and solution conductivity for a series of molecular systems, where it produces fits of comparable quality relative to the VFT and Arrhenius equations. Importantly, the resulting parameters exhibit systematic trends with molecular characteristics, e.g., alkyl chain length, enabling a direct physical interpretation of the driving forces of dynamics in terms of underlying thermodynamic properties.