Fast and cheap screening of oil spillages by thermogravimetry and pattern recognition

A fast and cheap methodology combining thermogravimetry (TGA) and chemometric methods to screen oil spills is presented. After optimizing the TGA procedure, the weathering of three hydrocarbon products (a Sahara crude oil and two very similar residual fuel oils) is monitored and the chemometric tools (dynamic principal components analysis, Self Organizing Maps (SOMs), and Linear and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis) revealed a good differentiation among them. It is also shown that usage of a reduced subset of two pyrolysis temperatures selected by means of dynamic-PCA yields results better than the overall thermogram. The combination of TGA and SOMs revealed as a straightforward option for routine screening of oil spills thanks to its simplicity.