Hi!
I am starting an internship soon and I had a question. The company who I might work for said they struggle to analyse crude oil. The reason for this is that a analysing device in a laboratory gets dirty and it can only be analysed a couple of times before they can throw that device away. So they assigned me to find a better method. Ofcourse I have some ideas and my interview was too short to ask what device gets dirty (it was more an interview about my background). I have a feeling but im not sure but they might use the distillation method. That method is pretty dirty and it takes long but im not sure. Now I am wondering if you use HPLC several times with analysing crude oil does the column or injection port gets dirty and needs to be thrown away? I got the same question with GC if it gets dirty and needs to be thrown away (or parts needs to be replaced).
Thanks in advance!
Crude oil can contain quite heavy molecules or even small solid particles. If you introduce solid into an HPLC column, it is clear that you will jam it at some point.
So I suppose some sort of filtration for those particles might be an idea.
First of all thank you for your time to answer my question. I had a feeling that is would jam because I think the crude oil still has contamination from the soil where it came from. What filtration do you advise to work with?
Hello,
In addition to the previous answer, you can try running the crude oil on a size exclusion column, separating the elution fraction into several sub-fractions, and analyzing each sub-fraction on the HPLC individually.
Ryan Wheeler Thank you for your response! I appreciate every information so I can start doing my research.
Yes, absolutely. Are you looking for impurities within the crude oil or are you performing a profile analysis of the crude oil. Also, by crude oil do you mean petroleum oil or a different type? If you are trying to profile a petroleum oil I recommend performing it with methylene chloride via GC-FID. This method is reliable and robust. This was the first method note I found on it, but I ran a similar method at an old lab years ago. There are far more efficient ways to extract now, but if you're analyzing the oil directly, I feel a simple dilute and shoot should fly for you.
You'll trash some liners and columns, but the Restek equivalent for this method is quite affordable. Just need to be comfortable doing regular inlet maintenance.
https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/Departments-and-Agencies/DPH/dph/environmental_health/environmental_laboratories/pdf/CTETPHMETHODpdf.pdf
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