ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the bulk and trace analyses of diesel fuels. Many analytical methods have been used to analyze major fuel components in varying degrees of detail, including mass spectrometry (MS), supercritical fluid chromatography, gas chromatography (GC), liquid chromatography, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and infrared spectroscopy. For detailed compositional analysis combined GC/MS and GC alone are commonly used. Combined GC/MS provides three-dimensional data for each component: GC retention time, mass, and abundance. The mass spectra acquired can be used as fingerprints for compound identification. In GC/MS, the distribution of diesel components can be displayed by mass chromatograms – ion-current traces of selected masses as a function of GC retention time. Mass spectrometry is well suited for characterizing individual components based on their molecular ions or characteristic fragment ions. Generally, the distributions of thousands of diesel components are grouped into compound types, according to the number of rings and double bonds in the molecules.
