COMPARISON OF INFRARED AND IMPEDANCE SPECTRA OF PETROLEUM FRACTIONS

For continuous process monitoring of opaque, heavy petroleum fractions and crude oils, a need for robust measurement systems has emerged. A proposed non-optical system, based on impedance spectroscopy (ID), is presented which can be considered in combination with optical methods. To evaluate the performance of the different methods, some initial an alysis is performed using infrared (i.r.) spectroscopic and impedance spectroscopic measurements on a set of fractionated crude oils. Multiv ariate analysis is used to correlate the different spectra with the de nsity of the petroleum fractions. Correlations between the ID and i.r, spectra are also undertaken.