Quality assessment of automotive fuel and oil-improving environmental sustainability

Ethanol as a radical scavenger being non-lead additive to fuel can act as quality improver as well as range extender, which abates the CO, emission and helps to improve air quality. Its limited concentration in blended fuels is beneficial, whereas, higher percentage of ethanol damage automotive fuel lines. Thus, a sensor system has been designed for evaluating the quality of ethanol blended gasoline by utilizing molecular imprinting technique in combination with transducers such as quartz crystal microbalances (QCMs). Moreover, a low cost miniaturized device based on interdigital transducers (IDTs) has also been developed for characterizing ethanol/gasoline mixtures. Acrylic acid and sodium p-styrene sulfonate polyelectrolytes as sensitive layers on IDT enable us to detect different percentages of polar ethanol in non-polar gasoline hydrocarbons by resistive measurements. Another step in improving environmental situation is achieved by characterizing the lubricating oil to determine an optimal time of oil change. Mass-sensitive devices are also tuned by utilizing molecular imprinting approach to analyze the octane number of fuel by differentiating the isomers iso-octane and n-octane. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.