Separation Science approaches to the Analysis and visualisation of Complex Petrochemical Materials

The description 'crude oil' conjures up in the minds of people a highly messy material that needs to be processed to generate useful materials. This is indeed true, but it hides the fact that the crude oil is a highly complex mixture of different compounds. This project concerns the analysis of oils: crude, processed and aged using a number of different mass spectrometry based methods. We aim to use Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry to investigate the isotopic signature of a library of oils for to enable provenancing and categorizing to evaluate if this information might be useful in fraud detection. We will also investigate these oils using High Resolution Mass Spectrometry to determine chemical profiles and investigate how these profiles alter through fractionation, processing and ageing. This work will evaluate the uses of this data for a number of outcomes of interest to the project partner.