A study of adulteration in gasoline samples using flame emission spectroscopy and chemometrics tools

Abstract

This work presents a low cost system based on Flame Emission Spectroscopy (FES) that enables the prediction of fuel adulteration. The spectral data acquired using FES were associated with chemometric tools – Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS), aiming to predict gasoline adulterations with different solvents. The classification of the Brazilian adulterated gasoline samples with turpentine, thinner, kerosene, rubber solvent and ethanol was carried out through a PLS-DA model built using five latent variables (LV) with an accumulated variance of 100% on X and 76.78% on Y. The combination of these techniques provided the discrimination of distinct groups for each one of the studied adulterants. Subsequent to the classification, samples of adulterated gasoline with the same solvents with contents varying from 1 to 50% (v/v) were analyzed through FES and multivariate calibration curves were employed in order to predict the contents of the respective solvents. The results obtained by the combination of FES and PLS provided the determination of gasoline adulterants with small calibration and validation errors and also lower values than the ones reported in the literature using other spectroscopic techniques.