Determination of Total Sulfur in Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Related Chemicals by UV Fluorescence according to ASTM D7183 Application Note · compEAct S

Introduction

Liquid aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons play an important role in refinery processes, the petrochemical, chemical and polymer industry, either as raw materials, process intermediates, or as end products. Regardless of their source or their further use, they all have in common that they need to be ultrapure. This means that they have to be free of undesired compounds, as these could affect the production process and the quality of the final products.

Impurities such as sulfur-containing compounds not only affect the performance and economic life of the used catalysts (catalyst poisoning), but also form unwanted by-products and thereby decrease the quality of the end product. Therefore their content has to be kept as low as possible, preferably below 100 ppb. To make this possible, the exact knowledge of the present sulfur (TS) is required. Combustion-based elemental analysis coupled with a UV fluorescence detector is the only method that has proven to be suitable for this challenging task.

The compEAct S is an analysis system which has been specifically optimized for the fast and trouble-free determination of sulfur contents in the ultra-trace range. Combining catalyst-free high-temperature combustion and highly sensitive HiPerSens detection, it allows the determination of sulfur at concentrations ranging from 5 µg/l up to 10,000 mg/l with one and the same device.