Introduction of a novel fluorescence based method for the composition estimation of petroleum fuel–biofuel blends

A sensitive analytical technique based on ‘white light excitation fluorescence’ (WLEF) has been developed for the quantification of various fuel blends like diesel–biodiesel, biodiesel–ethanol, and petrol–ethanol. These multifluorophoric fuel blends show large variations in their electronic absorption and fluorescence characteristics. Despite these variations, the developed technique enables composition estimation without any change in the instrument configuration, just by adjusting the fluorescence intensity control parameters. The combination of WLEF and multivariate modeling has provided a fairly fast and robust method with root mean square error prediction (RMSEP) values less than 1%. The developed fiber-optic compatible analytical technique provides a low cost, easy to use and easily standardizable method for the quantification of fuel compositions.