Author

Ling Bai

ORCID Identifier(s)

0000-0002-9849-4568

Graduation Semester and Year

2017

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry

Department

Chemistry and Biochemistry

First Advisor

Kevin A Schug

Abstract

Characterization and evaluation of hydrocarbon assets, including content of linear and branched alkanes, cycloalkanes, aromatics, olefins, and naphthenes, among others, during production and distribution are very crucial in oil and gas industries. Quantification and qualification of bulk composition of hydrocarbon groups in complex samples like gasoline, diesel, and other high value refinery products is very challenging. Gas chromatography (GC) is the most popular technique among the petrochemical industry and many of the EPA and ASTM methods have been established based on GC for analyzing hydrocarbons in complex mixtures. Though there are many methods available, there are still limitations on the existing methods. Vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopic absorption detection (VUV), a recent and impactful GC detector has been evaluated and investigated in this research on characterization of different components in oil and gas mixtures. The vacuum ultraviolet detector (VUV) is a non-destructive mass sensitive detector for gas chromatography that continuously and rapidly collects full wavelength range absorption between 120 and 240 nm. Samples ranging from gaseous mixtures, such as natural gas and lithium ion thermal runaway out-gassing to fossil fuel samples, including gasoline and diesel fuels, were analyzed to demonstrate the potential power of VUV coupled with GC. GC-VUV was shown to be a worthy alternative tool to other existing techniques on complex mixture quantitative and qualitative analysis, especially in terms of its complementarity to mass spectrometric detection.

Keywords

Gas Chromatography, Vacuum Ultraviolet Spectroscopy, Oil and Gas, Method Development, Qualification and Quantification

Disciplines

Chemistry | Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

31706-2.zip (3159 kB)

Included in

Chemistry Commons

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