COMPARAÇÃO DE SENSORES ELETROQUÍMICOS PARA DETERMINAÇÃO DE ENXOFRE EM BIODIESEL

Abstract

Due to the implementation of more restricted environmental regulation laws, the control of pollution agent such as sulfur compounds has provides the development of new analytic methodologies for its quantification on different matrices, including biodiesel fuel. Thus, this work aims to compare three different sensors - film bismuth and mercury film on the surface of a glassy carbon electrode and solid silver amalgam (dental) - for the determination of sulfur in biodiesel, by means of stripping voltammetric cathodic square wave mode (VRC/SW) as supporting electrolyte with a solution of sodium acetate (1,4 mol.Lˉ¹) and acetic acid (0.33 mol.Lˉ¹) in metanol/2-propanol. In general, the mercury film electrode (MFE) has presented the best electrochemical behavior to the definition of peak reduction, being then selected as standard electrode to the measurements. The sulfur quantization on biodiesel samples was performed by adding 70 μL of soybean biodiesel and tallow fatty with TMAH, adding later, aliquots of standard sulfur. The method showed good linearity (0.998), suggesting an average sulfur concentration of 6,870x10ˉ7 (± 6,857x10ˉ⁸) mol.Lˉ¹, within a confidence interval of 95%, to a limit of detection 3,294x10ˉ¹º mol.Lˉ¹ and quantification limit of 1,098x10ˉ9 mol.Lˉ¹. Besides, for the untreated sample, the experimental has provided a LD of 6,54 x 10ˉ9 mol.Lˉ¹. Finally the proposed method has been compared with the results of a collaborative study (ANP 01/2012) of the same sample using the Teste-t de Student, verifying that the proposed method and official methods (EN ISO 20846, EN ISO 20884) are statistically equivalent to a confidence level of 95%, thereby demonstrating the feasibility of the method.