The Use of GC-AES Multielement Simulated Distillation for Petroleum Product Fingerprinting

The use of GC-AES multielement simulated distillation with advanced data processing is described for application to fingerprinting petroleum-derived products. The addition of the variation of the elemental composition with boiling point is found to improve the ability to discriminate between samples over the use of gas chromatography alone. A fully automated system for performing the analysis is described. This system enables cost-efficient application of the analysis to a large number of samples, such as may be obtained when mapping out a site. Principal component analysis of the data obtained from a set of highly evaporated fuels is shown to yield distinct clusters for each fuel, regardless of the degree of evaporation, when the multielement data is included in the analysis.