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Some recent research I'm dealing with has required me to look for tables of experimental pressure/volume/temperature values (equivalently, a table of compressibility/compression factors in terms of any two of pressure, volume, or temperature) for various substances. Thus far, I've managed to obtain compression factor tables for a short list of substances from Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook.

I am wondering, however, as to where I should be looking for more extensive tables (e.g. tables with finer sampling), as well as tables for substances that were not included in that handbook. What books/websites/journal articles should I be looking at?

My attempts at searching on the Internet have not been very fruitful; I would appreciate knowing what keywords should I be using with the usual search engines to get better results.

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  • $\begingroup$ This borders on being one of those infernal make-a-list questions, but in its current form, it seems OK to me :) $\endgroup$
    – ManishEarth
    Jul 6, 2012 at 1:18
  • $\begingroup$ @Manish, I know, but I wouldn't be asking this question if it wasn't very troublesome to pull up references for this sort of thing... :( as I said in a comment to the answer, tabulating data like this is hard work. $\endgroup$
    – user95
    Jul 6, 2012 at 1:40
  • $\begingroup$ Yep. I doubt there are many lists like this--so it's fine :) $\endgroup$
    – ManishEarth
    Jul 6, 2012 at 3:05

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One place to look for simple fluids is http://webbook.nist.gov/chemistry/fluid/. But there are only a limited number of compounds treated.

Be warned that the data in the NIST Webbook is smoothed. Collecting data of this sort is very difficult. Many different sets of observations are combined and fitted to an appropriate equation. What is at the URL given above is computed from that equation.

If you are looking for overall compression factors, this will do very nicely. If you want five figure precision in compression factors, well, this won't do.

Another place to check is the which is a primary source of raw data.

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  • $\begingroup$ "Collecting data of this sort is very difficult." - yes, I've had to do a simplified version of that experiment myself, so I understand very well how difficult it was to obtain those data. Speaking of which... you speak of raw data. Those would be what I need (and somehow I think asking for five-figure precision here is a bit much to ask, so I didn't say so in the OP). Would you happen to have pointers on where I can obtain the raw data you speak of? (Corollary: I don't want the smoothed data, as I'll be doing comparisons with some equations of state.) $\endgroup$
    – user95
    Jul 6, 2012 at 1:04
  • $\begingroup$ Try the NIST data first. It is most likely the most accurate data available. Individual experiments almost never totally agree for a large number of reasons, which is why raw data may not be a good thing to use. Raw data will have to be found in the literature. The "Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data" (an American Institute of Physics publication) is a place to start. $\endgroup$
    – Paul J. Gans
    Jul 6, 2012 at 20:23

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