Measurement and Estimation of VOC Composition from Gasoline Evaporation

Source profiles were developed for a total of 45 volatile organic compounds (VOC) that can be emitted from gasoline evaporation. The gasoline samples of five major brands (for each season) were blended on the basis of the market share in Seoul area and analyzed by a GC-MS/FID system. In addition, we calculated gasoline evaporative compositions using the Raoult's law from the liquid gasoline compositions. The measured and estimated gasoline vapor compositions agree well each other. As a group, alkanes are the most abundant in the gasoline vapors profiles (77.4% on average), followed by alkenes (19.1%), and aromatics (1.7%). As a specie in gasoline vapor, i-pentane is the most abundant, followed by n-butane, n-pentane, i-butane, trans-and cis-2-butenes, 2-methyl-2-butene, and trans-and cis-2-pentenes . It was also seen that aromatic content was much lower in the vapor phase compositions. From the comparison between experimental and calculated compositions, we identified the fact that once the gasoline vapor composition is reliably constructed entirely from the measured gasoline composition and the Raoult's law calculations, the need for doing separate chemical analyses of the gasoline vapor can be reduced.