US 5,602,755 AGranted

Method for predicting chemical or physical properties of complex mixtures

AssigneeExxon Research & Engineering Co.

InventorsTerrence R. Ashe, Jeffrey D. Kelly, Tian C. Lau, Ronald T.-K. Pho

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Abstract

A Method for predicting the properties of a complex hydrocarbon mixture which comprises selecting one or more known chemical, perceptual, physical or performance properties of the complex mixture and creating a training set from reference samples which contain characteristic molecular species present in the mixture. The reference samples are subjected to GC/MS analysis wherein the often collinear data generated are treated by multivariate correlation methods. The training set produces coefficients which are multiplied by the matrix generated from a GC/MS analysis of an unknown mixture to produce a predicted value for the chemical, performance or physical property or groups of properties selected.

A method for predicting physical, perceptual, performance or chemical properties of a complex hydrocarbon mixture which comprises:

(a) selecting at least one property of the hydrocarbon mixture;
(b) selecting reference samples, said reference samples containing characteristic compound types present in the complex hydrocarbon mixture and which have known values of the property or properties selected in step (a);
(c) producing a training set by the steps of:
(1) injecting each reference sample into a gas chromatograph which is interfaced to a mass spectrometer thereby causing at least a partial separation of the hydrocarbon mixture into constituent chemical components;
(2) introducing the constituent chemical components of each reference sample into the mass spectrometer, under dynamic flow conditions;
(3) obtaining for each reference sample a series of time resolved mass chromatograms;
(4) calibrating the mass chromatograms to correct retention times;
(5) selecting a series of corrected retention time windows;
(6) selecting within each retention time window a series of molecular and/or fragment ions, said ions being representative of characteristic compounds or molecular classes expected within the retention time window;
(7) recording the total amount of each characteristic compound or compound group selected in step c(6);
(8) forming the data from steps c(6) and c(7) into a X-block matrix;
(9) forming the data selected in (a) for reference samples selected in (b) into a Y-block matrix;
(10) analyzing the data from steps c(8) and c(9) by multivariate correlation techniques including Partial Least Squares, Principal Component Regression, or Ridge Regression to produce a series of coefficients;
(d) subjecting an unknown hydrocarbon mixture to steps c(1) to c(3) in the same manner as the reference sample to produce a series of time resolved mass chromatograms;
(e) repeating steps c(4) to c(8) for each mass chromatogram from step (d);
(f) multiplying the matrix from step (e) by the coefficients from step c(10) to produce a predicted value of the property or properties.

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Abstract

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