Differentiation between weathered kerosene and diesel fuel using automatic thermal desorption-GC-MS analysis and the likelihood ratio approach

The identification of various petroleum products, which can be used to set a fire, is one of the tasks of a forensic examination. One of the analytical problems is differentiation of weathered kerosene and diesel fuel samples, analysed with automatic thermal desorption-GC-MS technique, because there are only small quantitative differences in their chemical compositions. The presented research showed that the observed differences in the analysed samples of kerosene and a diesel fuel, which were weathered at the time of burning, were systematic and significant. Therefore, it was possible to distinguish them on the basis of information about the relative content of n-alkanes (C11H24-C15H32) when statistical methods (cluster analysis and likelihood ratio approach) were applied.