It has been a challenge to conduct detailed molecular characterization on lubricant base oils, which are complicated hydrocarbon mixtures with high boiling points. Field ionization mass spectrometry (FIMS) has traditionally been used for the hydrocarbon group type analyses of Group II and III base oils that are extremely low in aromatic content.  One of the drawbacks to the use of FIMS is that the response factors can vary significantly within and between various classes of compounds, thus prohibiting accurate measurement and direct comparison between the amounts of the different classes of compounds within a sample.  Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography with flame ionization detection (GCxGC-FID) is a powerful technique that provides not only the potential separation power to resolve the overlapping classes of compounds of interest, but also the quantitative analysis for each compound class. In this work, resolution between paraffin and cycloparaffins with different ring numbers was achieved.  Results for a variety of hydroprocessed base oils demonstrate that the paraffin content in light neutral oils can vary by 25% or more.  The results of class determination for various light and medium neutral base oils will be presented.<br/>

Detailed molecular characterization of base oils using GCxGC-FID

254th National Meeting (2017)

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