Identification of automobile petrol adulteration by using optical methods

Abstract

Expensive consumer products are often adultered by integrating with cheaper low quality materials having similar physical and chemical properties. Most common type of adulteration is done by mixing cheaper homogenous products, such as kerosene and naphthalene, in petrol or diesel. Having similar properties, the fuel and the adulterant can not be distinguished easily leading to a complication in identification and quantification of the adulterants. Consequences of fuel adulteration are cause health problems connected to the increase of tailpipe emissions of hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), oxides of nitrogen (NOx), particulate matter(PM) which are harmful & sometimes carcinogenic pollutants. In this work , three spectroscopic techniques, Fluorescence Emission spectra ,Synchronous Fluorescence Scan and Resonance Raman spectra have been used to study the effects of adding a known quantity of kerosene to pure petrol and compare results with twenty specimens of petrol obtained from different commercial service petrol stations in Riyadh City . In this work , we have been able to show that all the three techniques (Fluorescence Emission spectra , Synchronous Fluorescence Scan and Resonance Raman Spectra ) subjected to the samples from service petrol stations in Riyadh city , shown that there is a high range level of adulteration by kerosene in the range of 70 – 90 % .