Detection of gasoline adulteration using colorimetric sensor array based on Au\Ag bimetallic nanoparticles and pattern recognition methods

The quality control of gasoline is the serious and important economic and environmental in many manufacturing industries and other activities [1]. The negative effects of adulterated gasoline such as engine damage and air pollution and destructive effects in fuel oil industries because of using fraudulent mixing of low-priced reagents with higher-priced fuels are necessary reasons for investigating the quality of gasoline [2, 3]. So, the development of the high sensitive and safe portable sensor for on-site analysis of gasoline is a great goal in last decade. Herein, we present a novel colorimetric sensor array based on 30 types of Au\Ag bimetallic nanoparticles which preparation with green reducing agent including lemon juice, pomegranate juice, orange juice and chemical agent such as citric acid, gallic acid and ascorbic acid. This array was used to discriminate the petroleum-based products such as gasoline, diesel, thinner, ethanol, methanol, kerosene and detection the amount of these species in fake gasoline. Changing in color sensing elements is based on aggregation or destruction of nanoparticles which produce unique color change profiles for each specific analytes can be monitored with an ordinary flatbed scanner. The discriminatory ability of proposed sensor array was investigated by different chemometrics methods of classification such as principle component analysis (PCA), hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) with 100 % classification accuracy.