Establishment and application of an intelligent treating method for oil spill identification

Abstract

In the identifying process of an oil spill accident, manual integral and artificial visual comparison are commonly used at present to determine the oil spill sources, these methods are time-consuming and easily affected by human factors. Therefore, it is difficult to achieve the purpose of rapid identification of an oil spill accident. In this paper, an intelligent method of automatic recognition, integration and calculation of diagnostic ratio of Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer (GC/MS) spectrum are established. Firstly, four hundreds of samples collected around the world were analyzed using a standard method and Retention time locking technology (RTL) was applied to reduce the change of retention time of GC/MS spectrum. Secondly, the automatic identification, integration of n-alkanes, biomarker compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and calculation of the diagnostic ratios were realized by MATLAB software. Finally, a database of oil fingerprints were established and applied successfully in a spill oil accident. Based on the new method and database, we could acquire the diagnostic ratios of an oil sample and find out the suspected oil within a few minutes. This method and database can improve the efficiency in spilled oil identification.