Study On The Identification Of Oil Spill Fingerprints

As industrialization processes speed up and demands for energy grow worldwide, oil spills have become a global problem. The huge quantities of spilled oils and petroleum products enter our sea, territory and groundwater, causing extensive damage to marine life, terrestrial life, human health, and natural resources. Oil spill identification is one of the important technological means to determine the source of oil spill accidents on sea ,which is not only able to provide a scientific and powerful evidence for settlement investigation of the accidents, but also to support a guiding role in investigating and dealing with the accidents.Fluorescence Spectroscopy has many advantages, such as rapid, high sensitivity and selectivity, little sample, and suitable for field operation, etc. It has becoming an effective and important identification method. But this method is not suitable used to identify the similar components oils. GC/MS could distinguish microscopic difference of biomarkers among samples and test most of petroleum compounds and their isomers. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are one group of compounds present in oil. These PAHs are resistant to biodegradation conditions typically encountered in spill situations and have been proved to be useful for yielding important clues about its sources or fingerprint. This fingerprint can be used to correlate a biodegraded oil to a sample of its non-degraded equivalent, and hence can be use to identify the source(s) of a petroleum release. Therefore, this paper adopts following two ways in order to study on oil fingerprint.(1) Analyses of 16 oil samples (gasoline, crude oil, fuel oil, diesel oil, lubricant) were performed with fluorescence spectrophotometer, and the spectrograms of general fluorescence scan, synchronous fluorescence scan, derivative fluorescence analysis, and 3D fluorescence were obtained. The results show general fluorescence spectroscopy represent only partial characteristic of oils, and was not effective in the identification of oil samples; synchronous fluorescence has more spectral characteristics, and also has many advantages, such as rapid, sample and little interference etc, showing a dominant method in spilled oil identification; 3D fluorescence spectrograms has rich information and can be used to identify different type gasoline, fuel oil, diesel oil further, however, this method is not feasible to identify oil samples with similar compounds.(2) A reliable, effective, and accurate GC/MS method for the identification of 9 oil samples by the use of the PAH compound is described. Analyses of PAHs of 9 oil samples (gasoline, crude oil, fuel oil, diesel oil, lubricant) were performed with GC/MS. Using the comparison of PAH original fingerprint and distribution pattern recognition, 9 oil samples were identified successfully. Although distinction was diminutive, it can still be identified .These results show that crude oils and refined products from different sources could be identified successfully by GC/MS. analyzing PAH distributions in oil samples.