Studies on Adulteration in Petroleum products and Environmental Pollutants Analytical Method Development

Abstract

Identification and quantification of petroleum products particularly petroleum fuels and lubricants adulteration is challenging because the adulterants usually comprise those already present in these petroleum products. The complexity of petroleum products composition and their potential adulterants leads to a challenging scenario where enforcement and compliance of regulatory specifications are often not easy. However, no test is specially designed to detect the adulteration of petroleum products. There has been an increased concern on this issue in India due to the lack of organized research and limited availability of sophisticated equipment. It is necessary to explore the immense scope for developing simple, cost effective, accurate, and efficient analytical methods that involve physicochemical, chromatography, and spectroscopy techniques leading to an opportunity to investigate the nature and levels of adulterants in petroleum products. It is also important to develop simple, cost effective, accurate, and efficient analytical methods for monitoring vehicular emissions. This thesis mainly describes the development of simple high performance liquid chromatography based method for simultaneous determination of biodiesel and non esterified vegetable oils or used cooking oil as adulterants in diesel and green diesel within seven minutes run time. The method is highly beneficial to verify diesel adulterants and support monitoring of diesel quality as per the Indian regulatory specifications. This thesis also describes the development of simple gas chromatography based method for quantifying sixteen priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in particulate matter emitted from two biodiesel fuels produced from Jatropha curcas and microalga Chlorella variabilis and compared with diesel. This study is beneficial for society, not only for economic purposes but also for controlling environmental pollution. newline