New Technique Of Determination Of Biogenic Fraction In Liquid Fuels By The 14C Method

According to the EU Directive 2009/28/EC all (liquid) fuels have to contain at least 10 percent of bio-fuel, i.e., blend of biogenic origin, by 2020. 14C method is the most reliable method of determination of the biogenic fraction in fuels and various measurement techniques can be applied. A technique of direct measurement of the 14C content in liquid fuel is simple and fast but has main disadvantage: different liquid colours cause different quenching and changes in the measurement efficiency. Here we have described a new technique that uses liquids of different colours to construct modern and background calibration curves, MCC and BCC, respectively, by measuring count rates and SQP values of various modern and fossil liquids. Several types of fossil fuel, pure benzine and benzene (used as 14C-free background for 14C dating) were used for BCC, and various brands of domestic oil (vegetable, sunflower, olive, pumpkin), bioethanol and benzene prepared from modern samples were used MCC construction. The procedure for the unknown sample consists of: 1) measurement of the count rate and the SQP value, 2) calculation of background and modern count rates corresponding to the measured SQP value based on the BCC and MCC curves, respectively, and 3) the ratio of net count rates of the unknown sample and the modern net count rate at the same SQP represents the fraction of the biogenic component in the liquid. All samples should be measured under the same conditions. In our case these are: UltimaGold F scintillator, the ratio sample:scintillator (10 mL:10 mL), low-potassium glass vials of 20 mL volume, spectra recorded by LSC Quantulus and evaluated in the window 124 - 570. Lowest detectable biogenic fraction is 0.5 %. The technique depends neither on the fossil matrix or the biogenic additive types. The results are in good agreement with those obtained by different evaluation technique. (author).