Design and application of chemometric methods to the determination of compounds of interest in biodiesels

Abstract

The increasing exhaustion of fossil fuels and the environmental concern about the consequent increased greenhouse gas emissions have propelled the development of biofuels. Because of its similar physicochemical properties, biodiesel is an alternative to diesel fuels made from petroleum. Biodiesel consists of a mixture of alkyl esters of long chain fatty acids susceptible to oxidation. The quality parameters of biodiesel must be analyzed by wellestablished analytical methodologies, rapid and accessible to meet the growing demand for this product. Several analytical techniques have been used for biodiesel analysis. Within them, the spectroscopic techniques have been played an important role, since they allow direct, fast and non-destructive analysis of biodiesel samples. One of the main problems of such techniques is the lack of selectivity found in the spectroscopic measurements of complex samples, which makes classical calibration methods fail. Therefore, chemometric tools have been largely applied in combination with spectroscopic data for biodiesel analysis...