Quantification of Ethanol in Ethanol-Petrol and Biodiesel in Biodiesel-Diesel Blends Using Fluorescence Spectroscopy and Multivariate Methods

Abstract

Ethanol blended petrol and biodiesel blended diesel are being introduced in many countries to meet the increasing demand of hydrocarbon fuels. However, technological limitations of current vehicle engine do not allow ethanol and biodiesel percentages in the blended fuel to be increased beyond a certain level. As a result quantification of ethanol in blended petrol and biodiesel in blended diesel becomes an important issue. In this work, calibration models for the quantification of ethanol in the ethanol-petrol and biodiesel in the biodiesel-diesel blends of a particular batch were made using the combination of synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy (SFS) with principal component regression (PCR) and partial least square (PLS) and excitation emission matrix fluorescence (EEMF) with N-way Partial least square (N-PLS) and unfolded-PLS. The PCR, PLS, N-PLS and unfolded-PLS calibration models were evaluated through measures like root mean square error of cross-validation (RMSECV), root mean square error of calibration (RMSEC) and square of the correlation coefficient (R(2)). The prediction abilities of the models were tested using a testing set of ethanol-petrol and biodiesel-diesel blends of known ethanol and biodiesel concentrations, error in the predictions made by the models were found to be less than 2%. The obtained calibration models are highly robust and capable of estimating low as well as high concentrations of ethanol and biodiesel.