| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1200906 | Journal of Chromatography A | 2012 | 7 Pages |
Most oil characterisation procedures are time consuming, labour intensive and utilise only part of the acquired chemical information. Oil spill fingerprinting with multivariate data processing represents a fast and objective evaluation procedure, where the entire chromatographic profile is used. Methods for oil classification should be robust towards changes imposed on the spill fingerprint by short-term weathering, i.e. dissolution and evaporation processes in the hours following a spill. We propose a methodology for the classification of petroleum products. The method consists of: chemical analysis; data clean-up by baseline removal, retention time alignment and normalisation; recognition of oil type by classification followed by initial source characterisation. A classification model based on principal components and quadratic discrimination robust towards the effect of short-term weathering was established. The method was tested successfully on real spill and source samples.
► Fingerprint classification was used as screening tool for oil spill-source matching. ► Implementing knowledge of short-term weathering effects refined classification. ► Real spill samples were classified by oil-type and spill-source similarity explored.
