Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Device to detect exhaust

OldFool - 8-3-2011 at 13:17

Hello everyone.

I am a fuel tester for sprint cars. My job is to collect a fuel sample from the tank of a sprint car, then using a Gas Chromatograph machine using Helium gas to detect any other volatile liquids mixed with methanol alcohol, our racing fuel. I use a base line from a sample obtained through our retailer to compare results. This method has been used for over 20 years and questions have come up about other ways a racing team can circumvent our testing methods.
I am by no means educated in chemistry. I was chosen for this position because of basic knowledge on operating the chromatograph. I worked with a high school chemistry teacher that previously held the fuel testing job until his retirement.
Enough of the history. Is there a way to "sniff" the exhaust from a sprint car to detect any type of volatile additives besides methanol? A device that can read out what said additive is either through the hand held device or from a sample, broken down using a computer/machine.
As stated earlier, I am not educated in chemistry. I found your site through searching for a device that could suit my needs. Maybe there is another possibility for testing that I am not aware of.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Chordate - 8-3-2011 at 13:31

A GC instrument tells you the relative amount of time that it takes for a sample to pass through the instrument, and how much material was detected at those times. The only things that the instrument should have a hard time detecting is material which is inert, such as noble gasses. This isn't a problem because feeding an engine noble gasses won't help their cause.

What COULD happen, though it would be very difficult, is they could find a fuel additive that has the same elution time as a the material you are looking for. If a smaller amount was used than the methanol it would be very hard to detect. One peak would effectively be "hidden" by the other. The solution then would be to use a Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectrometer instrument, which will give you an idea of the molecular weights of all the materials in a given peak, as well as characteristic fragmentation patterns. This instrument should be nigh impossible to fool by that technique.

[Edited on 8-3-2011 by Chordate]

Contrabasso - 8-3-2011 at 14:09

Try a few tests with likely compounds to see what you can detect. You don't have to publish the details.

For example try nitro-methane see if 2 or 20% makes an obvious additional peak on the trace. I've heard of Acetone being proposed as a performance enhancer for road vehicles, so try 2 and 20% of that too. You are only going to need 1ml of each mix so a few tests should cost pence/cents