Estudo da previsão de propriedades do biodiesel utilizando espectros de infravermelho e calibração multivariada

Abstract

Biodiesel has been widely used as a renewable energy source which contributes to the mineral diesel decrease demand. Therefore, there are several properties that must be monitored in order to produce and distribute biodiesel with the required quality. In this work, the biodiesel physical properties such as specific mass, refractive index and cold filter plugging point were measured and associated with near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) and mid-Infrared spectroscopy (mid-IR) spectra using chemometric tools. The Partial Least Squares Regression (PLS), Interval Partial Least Squares Regression (iPLS), and Support Vector Machines Regression (SVM) with variable selection by Genetic Algorithm (GA) methods were used to model the aforementioned properties. The biodiesel samples were synthesized from different sources such as canola, sunflower, corn, and soybean. Additional biodiesel samples were purchased from a Brazil South Region supplier. Firstly, the preprocessing baseline correction was used to normalize the NIR spectral data, following others preprocessing types were applied in such as the mean center, the first derivative and standard normal variate. The best result for predicting the cold filter plugging point was using Mid-IR spectra and GA-SVM regression method, with high coefficient determination of prediction, R2Pred = 0.94 and low value of the Root Mean Square Error of Prediction, RMSEP (°C) = 0.7. For the specific mass prediction model, the best result was obtained using the Mid-IR spectrums and PLS regression, with the R2Pred = 0.98 and RMSEP (g/cm3) = 0.0002. As for a prediction model for the refractive index, the best result was obtained using the Mid-IR spectrums and PLS regression, with the R2Pred = 0.98 and RMSEP = 0.0001. For these datasets, the PLS and SVM models demonstrated theirs robustness, presenting themselves as useful tools for the biodiesel properties prediction studied