Assessment of Combustion and Pollution Potentials of Premium Motor Spirit [PMS] and Automotive Gas Oil [AGO].

Abstract

In the past decade, there has been a growing concern over the increase in the use of electric generating sets in Nigeria due to incessant power outages. These sets are either powered by Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) or automotive gas oil (AGO) and their combustion usually generate compounds/products which have serious environmental consequences. To this end, these products were combusted in a specially fabricated combustion chamber in order to determine their pollution potentials. The combustion effluents as well as particulate matter were trapped in dichloromethane and the resulting solution filtered to recover the particulate matter which represents the actual quantity of particulate matter librated into the atmosphere, when a given quantity of refined product is combusted. PMS yielded 1.9g/l while AGO yielded 2.7g/l of particulate matter. The recovered particulates and combustion residues were separately subjected to soxhlet extraction using dichloromethane as solvent. The extracts and effluents were concentrated and analyzed via flame ionization detector chromatography. The chromatograms show evidence of Polyaromatic hydrocarbons of retention times ranging from 8.800 to 26.999mins. These results obtained go a long way in giving some insights into the extent of pollution generated from the combustion of the selected petroleum products.

Key words: PAHs ,  Particulates ,PMS,AGO and Effluents ,Extracts.