Advances in the measurements of the biodiesel oxidative stability

Biodiesel reduces tailpipe emissions in comparison to petroleum-diesel fuels. Oxidative stability is emerging as an important issue for biodiesel fuel because it affects fuel end properties and hence engine performance. Oxidation stability is very complex property of biodiesel fuel because it depends upon several inter-dependent physiochemical factors. Therefore, finding an analytical technique to measure the Oxidative Stability of biodiesel fuel is a very challenging task. The present study reviews the research advances made into the development of the key analytical, chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques in the literature for the measurement and quantification of the oxidative stability of biodiesel fuel, and to identify the associated research challenges needed to overcome to achieve a repeatable and accurate biodiesel oxidative stability measurement technique. Paper presents the recent advances made in the different spectroscopic techniques: the spectrofluorimetry and multivariate calibration method, UV-VIS (Ultraviolet-Visible) spectrophotometry, Fourier Transformed Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Method, and Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technique. Of all the spectroscopic techniques, NIRS methods has been emerging as very promising technique for measuring oxidative stability of biodiesel because of its advantages of being non-destructive, fast, precise and use of multiple properties for setting up the calibration.