Source identification of underground fuel spills by solid-phase microextraction/high-resolution gas...

Area of Science:

• Analytical Chemistry
• Environmental Forensics
• Chemical Engineering

Background:

• Environmental contamination by jet fuel spills necessitates reliable source identification methods.
• Accurate typing of aviation turbine fuels is crucial for forensic investigations and environmental monitoring.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a method for typing common U.S. jet fuels (JP-4, Jet-A, JP-7, JPTS, JP-5, JP-8).
• To enable the tracing of environmental jet fuel spill samples to their original source.

Main Methods:

• Solid-phase microextraction (SPME) for headspace sampling of jet fuels.
• Capillary column gas chromatography to obtain reproducible fuel profiles.
• Standardization of chromatograms using peak-matching software and feature selection via a genetic algorithm (GA).
• Principal component analysis (PCA) integrated into the GA for effective pattern recognition.

Main Results:

• SPME generated well-resolved and reproducible gas chromatogram profiles for 180 neat jet fuel samples.
• A genetic algorithm successfully identified key features for pattern recognition, leading to clustering of chromatograms by fuel type.
• The integrated GA-PCA approach effectively filtered information and focused on distinguishing features, improving classification accuracy.

Conclusions:

• The developed method, combining SPME, gas chromatography, and a pattern recognition genetic algorithm, shows promise for accurate jet fuel typing.
• This approach can significantly aid in identifying the source of environmental jet fuel spills.
• The 'smart' one-pass procedure offers an efficient tool for forensic analysis of fuel samples.