| Petroleum plays an important role in the development of the national economy. China’s demand for petroleum as well as the proportion of imports has been increasing year by year. Marine transport becomes the main channel of crude oil and refined oil trade. Meanwhile, offshore drilling platforms become an indispensable part of petroleum exploitation due to the increasing difficulty and cost of land-based oil exploration. However, it is difficult to completely avoid oil spill that can lead to very serious damage to the marine environment and ecosystem. The traceability analysis based on oil fingerprints can provide not only a crucial evidence for economic compensation for the oil spill responsibility, but also a reference to explore the migration and transformation mechanisms of oil spill during pollution treatment and environmental restoration.In order to make a convincing identification of spilled oil source, more than one kind of analysis method should be used. Hitherto, much attention has been focused on the oil fingerprint study by using gas chromatograph, mass spectra, infrared spectra and etc. Comparably, the detection of Raman spectrum can cause no damage to the sample; especially, the Raman signal of seawater is very weak and cannot disturb the extraction of the Raman fingerprint of crude oil. In this thesis, we use Confocal Microscopic Raman spectrometry to investigate the fingerprints of crude oil samples corresponding to different sources. Further, the influence of weathering time on the Raman fingerprints is also discussed. Under the optimized conditions, the classification of both crude oils and weathered samples can be successfully achieved by using distance, average linkage and Bayes discrimination analyses. Our results demonstrate that Raman fingerprint can provide a convincing and convenient evidence to trace the source of crude oil. We anticipate that this concept could also be useful to the fingerprint investigation on other kinds of oils. |
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