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Differentiation of Unevaporated Gasoline Samples According to Their Brands, by SPME–GC–MS and Multivariate Statistical Analysis
Author(s) -
Monfreda Maria,
Gregori Adolfo
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of forensic sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.715
H-Index - 96
eISSN - 1556-4029
pISSN - 0022-1198
DOI - 10.1111/j.1556-4029.2010.01644.x
Subject(s) - gasoline , principal component analysis , chromatography , gas chromatography–mass spectrometry , data matrix , matrix (chemical analysis) , chemometrics , linear discriminant analysis , gas chromatography , chemistry , sample (material) , refinery , mass spectrometry , multivariate statistics , mathematics , statistics , clade , biochemistry , organic chemistry , gene , phylogenetic tree
One of the aims of fire investigations is to identify associations among accelerants according to their source. In this study, 50 gasoline samples—representing five brands—were analyzed using solid‐phase microextraction (SPME) and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS). Chemometric procedures, such as principal component analysis (PCA) and discriminant analysis (DA), were applied to a data matrix obtained by the target compound chromatogram method, to discriminate samples according to their brand. PCA was successful in finding a natural grouping of samples according to their brand, suggesting that aromatic compounds were more useful than aliphatics for the purpose of this study. DA, if applied to aromatic compounds, gave both a classification ability and a prediction ability of 100%. The outstanding results obtained by this work provide the basis of a data matrix that could be used in real cases of arson to link a sample of unevaporated gasoline to its brand or refinery.