Abstract:
A new approach for quantifying the ethanol concentration in gasohol E10 and E20 based on conductometric method is demonstrated. The conceptual experimental procedure is based on the reaction between ethanol and electrolytic solution via esterification. The conductivity of the reacted solution can be detected via conductometric method. The experimental results show that the suitable electrolytic solution is 20 %v/v acetic acid. It is found that conductivity of the reacted solution is inversely proportional to ethanol concentrations. The linear relation was y = -10.0303x + 1624.69 with correlation coefficient of 0.9973, where y is solution conductivity (µS/cm) and x is concentration of ethanol (%v/v). By using this linear relationship, the ethanol content can be efficiently quantified with good intra-day and inter-day precision (<2.53% RSD). By using liquid-liquid extraction, the extracted ethanol concentration from eight gasohol samples was determined by the proposed method and the results shows that the calculated concentration was closed to the sample concentration. Also, the ethanol concentration of each sample was quantified by the GC technique to validated the proposed method. From the statistical analysis for t-test calculation) at a 95% confidence level, the calculated t value was found to be 0.88, which was lower than the critical value (2.36; n = 7). This result assured that there were no significant differences between the results obtained by these two methods. This implied a high capability of our assay for the detection of ethanol in gasohol samples.