COMPARISON OF NEAR-IR, RAMAN, AND MID-IR SPECTROSCOPIES FOR THE DETERMINATION OF BTEX IN PETROLEUM FUELS

We report for the first time a direct comparison of the three most com mon vibrational analysis techniques for the determination of individua l BTEX components (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, ortho-xylene, meta- xylene, and para-xylene) in blended commercial gasolines, Partial leas t-squares (PLS) regression models were constructed for each BTEX compo nent by using each of the three spectroscopic techniques. A minimum of 120 types of blended gasolines were used in the training set for each BTEX component. Leave-one-out validation of the training sets yields lower standard errors for Raman and mid-IR spectroscopies when compare d to near-IR for all six BTEX components. In general, mid-IR has sligh tly lower standard errors than Raman, These trends are upheld when the models are tested by using independent test sets with a minimum of 40 types of blended gasolines (all of which differ in composition from t he training set).