Just Add Water: To Your Routine Hydrocarbon Analyses

Water contamination in various fuels and hydrocarbon mixes can lead to a wide range of complications including corrosion, filter plugging, freezing at low temperatures, phase separations, or critical errors in BTU and Wobbe Index determinations. Karl Fischer titration is a commonly used procedure to detect and analyse the water content in many liquid and gas processes. This procedure, while highly selective to water concentration, involves the use of costly reagents and requires several critical steps to insure an accurate determination. Additionally, a number of functional groups are known to interfere with the Karl Fischer titrations including; mercaptans, sulphides, aldehydes and ketones.

The VGA-100, from VUV Analytics (USA), is the world’s first gas chromatography detector utilising vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) absorption spectroscopy. The instrument simultaneously measures absorption between 120nm and 240nm. In this wavelength region, virtually all gas phase molecules have very strong and unique absorption responses. The VGA-100 is a highly sensitive universal detector based upon Beer-Lambert’s Law which provides both qualitative and quantitative data. 

The VGA-100 has demonstrated excellent performance analysing hydrocarbon mixes and has received rapid adoption into the petrochemical, petroleum and natural gas markets. Customers are now expanding the utility of the instrument by adding water to their analysis routines. For many applications, this requires no additional effort or special column technologies. As shown in the illustration, water concentration is determined during a standard VUV-PIONA+TM analysis and visually verified by the water spectral signature.