A2 Technologies has announced that its PAL and iPAL portable FTIR analysers are being used for measuring the biodiesel fatty-acid methyl ester content (per cent FAME) in diesel fuels for applications where low level contamination of diesel fuel by these chemicals is problematic.
Diesel fuel containing up to five per cent biodiesel meets the ASTM D975 standard, which does not require disclosure of the biodiesel level, and this can be a significant issue for certain diesel fuel users. A2 Technologies has developed an enhanced method for determining contamination levels of FAME in diesel. This method combines the more sensitive transmission IR sampling interface specified in EN 14078 with the universal algorithm and sample set specified in ASTM D7371 to produce the most sensitive and accurate method available. This enables the PAL systems to quickly and accurately predict the percentage of biodiesel in diesel fuel in the range from 0.025 to 20 per cent. The company claims that the accuracy of this method has been found to be superior to the other methods, especially for measuring low levels of biodiesel.
The PAL systems use A2's TumblIR transmission technology to provide the 100µm pathlength specified in the EN 14078 method.
