Rapid detection of gasoline contaminated with acetone with ... vanilla

Instead of investing billions of dong to detect acetone in gasoline, Vietnamese scientists have discovered that it is possible to use vanilla (often used for cooking tea, creating aroma) to quickly detect acetone in gasoline samples. and only cost up to tens of thousands of dong.

Using vanillin (a housewife often called vanilla, for tea, vegetables . for aroma), one can quickly detect and analyze the acetone content in a suspected gasoline sample .

This is an interesting result that was just MSc. Nguyen Thi Thu Van - Faculty of Chemical Technology, Ho Chi Minh City University of Science and Technology, provided in the topic 'Research on the ability to detect - rapid analysis of acetone and carbonyl compounds in gasoline'.

The key to the topic is based on the ability of acetone to dissolve more in water than gasoline: use acetone extract from gasoline and analyze acetone in the aqueous phase.

Top: Gasoline will change color according to the amount of acetone in gasoline according to the corresponding ratio of 1.5%;2%;0.1%;0.2%;0.5-1%;Bottom row: Quick test kit acetone costs only tens of thousands of dong

According to the study: after adding water and gasoline to extract the water phase suspected to be contaminated with acetone, add a quantity of vanillin to the aqueous phase extracted with a 10% NaOH solution at an appropriate rate. Shake well and develop color for 10 minutes, in an alkaline environment, vanillin is made with vanillalacetone acetone or yellow-orange divanillalacetone. It is possible to compare color scales (which are pre-set) corresponding to acetone concentrations of 0.01 to 2% in gasoline.

Also according to the topic, if the concentration of acetone is greater than 2%, a vertical cylindrical, circular section with an etched, underside, can be used to detect acetone in gasoline.

After mixing water and gasoline into this tube, the volume difference before and after the shaking of the water phase is the volume of acetone transferred from gasoline to water. In particular, the concentration of acetone: 2% corresponds to the change of 1 bar of the water phase on the cylinder before and after shaking.

In Vietnam, there was a time when 'explosion' of acetone-contaminated gasoline caused damage to the pongtu series of motorcycles. Mixing acetone into gasoline with low concentration can increase octane index, make the burning process more thorough, especially, helping the engine save fuel significantly: adding 0.8 - 2.7 ml acetone to one liters of gasoline or 0.4 - 1.6 ml of acetone into one liter of DO oil will help save 2 - 10% of fuel. However, the use of acetone in gasoline has not been officially recognized in the world, especially with a large content because it is an organic solvent with a strong destructive power of plastic materials.

It is known that acetone analysis methods in gasoline used in the world today belong to the group of analytical methods (commonly known as GC-MS), requiring expensive analytical equipment (over 1 billion copper) and the operator must have a high technical level.

However, in fact, despite the use of GC-MS, the analyst is still likely to mistakenly identify acetone in gasoline because acetone and some of the gasoline's hydrocarbons for very specific fragments are very close together.

According to MSc. Thu Van, if used for research and application, with a fairly simple set of tools, costing a few tens of thousands of dong for the first attempt, the later attempts only cost 500 dong to buy a vanilla tube, people can absolutely Self-check the presence of acetone in gasoline when compared to the available color scale.

The disadvantage of this method is that it is not possible to directly add vanilla to gasoline, but to remove acetone from gasoline, but it is not too complicated.