Determination of Methyl Mirystate Content in Biofuels Using NIR Spectroscopy

Liquid biofuels of the second generation can be considered fuels produced from non-edible raw materials, i.e. fried oils and animal fats. At the same time, recognizing biofuels of such origin as fully valued requires that their physicochemical properties be similar to traditional diesel. Due to the limited supply of non-edible fats and dispersed sources of their production, the production of biofuels on an industrial scale is economically unjustified. The good thing is local production. For this reason, cheap, easy to use biofuel quality assessment methods for small production sites should be developed. The objective of this study is to construct calibration models with the least squares regression (PLS) method adopted for the prediction of the content of methyl myristate (concentration from 0 to 5%) in rapeseed oil methyl ester (RME) on the basis of the obtained absorption spectra within near infrared range. The mean-squared error of the predictor that equals to 0.05% will be used to apply the developed calibration models to assess the quality of biofuels according to the standard PN-EN 14214.