Determination of Biodiesel Content in Diesel Fuel by Time-Domain Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (TD-NMR) Spectroscopy

Abstract

Considering the need for knowing the amount of biodiesel in fuels, in order to attend several legislations around the world, this work aimed to develop a new, rapid, and nondestructive time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance (TD-NMR)-based method for the biodiesel content determination in diesel–biodiesel blends. Main findings have revealed that both the transverse relaxation time ( T 2 ) and signal areas from relaxation spectra are highly correlated to biodiesel content in the fuel samples. The highest correlation was reached by applying PLS multivariate regression over T 2 decay curve profiles. Therefore, both univariate and multivariate approaches were able to determine biodiesel content in diesel–biodiesel blends with high accuracy directly from fuel samples in a simple, fast, and inexpensive way.