Prediction of HEFA content in jet fuel using FTIR and chemometric methods

Alternative aviation fuel blending components are becoming a common component in gas turbine engines fuels. One of the blending components is Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA). Predictive models based on a chemometric processing of FTIR spectra were developed as a reliable method for the determination of HEFA in petroleum jet fuel/HEFA blends. The concentration of HEFA in blends with jet fuel ranged between 0 and 60 wt %. The sample set composed of calibration and validation subsets. Additionally, several pre-processing techniques were evaluated, such as mean centering, variance scaling, derivation, and smoothing. The effectiveness of these models was highly dependent on the model parameters (pre-processing techniques and latent variables). The most robust model was able to predict HEFA content in all samples with a good predictive ability (root mean square error of prediction of 0.7 wt%).