Identification of the Chemical Components Derived from the Two-Phase Electrocoagulation of Diesel Fuel

In this study, two-phase electrocoagulation (EC) approach was developed and used to investigate blend of bio-diesel and petro-diesel (B10) stability under the electrochemical treatment. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was used to analyze the aliquots before and after the reaction. The major compounds were alkanes and aromatic compounds with the minor contents of aldehydes, ketones, esters, alkenes, alkynes, halogens, oxygenated compounds, and heterocyclic compounds. The selected condition for the reaction was 10 V and 60 min which resulted in 9.9x109 counts per s total peak area of compounds containing from nine to seventeen carbon atoms (C9 to C17) compared with 6.8x108 counts per s for the control. The peak areas of the straight chain alkanes increased from 12 % to 33 % of the total peak areas observed after the experiment. Compounds with higher peak areas were found between C12 to C14 with the retention indices range of 1155-1678. The EC treatment mainly increased the straight and branched alkane and alcohol contents with the decreasing contents of branched cyclic alkanes. The developed system could be adapted to study the stability of other types of fuels. This is cost effective and can be performed within an hour at room temperature under atmospheric pressure. One of the most widely use fuels is the diesel fuel. Conventional fossil-based diesel fuel is not stable under long term storage or certain temperature. The renewable diesel fuel such as bio-diesel is also known to be less stable than the fossil fuel. Such instability affects engines efficiency, especially with the modern engines operated at higher temperature. It is thus important to develop an efficient method to investigate the fuel stability leading to several standard methods for diesel and bio diesel stability analysis such as rancimate method or PetroOxy, e. g. established by ASTM, European Union and various governing bodies. Such conventional methods as well as several other methods reported from literature can be lengthy, costly and require high temperature and pressure. This leads us to develop and apply two phase electrocoagulation (EC) method to treat a fuel (B10) sample as an alternative approach for the fuel stability investigation. The EC condition was selected at 10 V for 60 min. This method resulted in a range of volatile compounds including the oxidation products. This provides room for more researches with a simple, fast, and cost-effective method to study stability of fuel using.image