Patent ID: 9678002
Date: 2017-06-13
CPC Classifications: G01N

Claim:
1. A method of estimating the relative concentration of components contained in an unknown mixture of the components, each component being a mixture of different hydrocarbon molecular species, the method comprising the steps of: (a) receiving at least two components from discrete sources; (b) producing at least two calibration mixtures comprising the at least two components from discrete sources and a liquid hydrocarbon diluting solvent selected from the group consisting of naphtha, alkane solvents, refined hydrocarbon solvents, and mixtures thereof, each of the at least two calibration mixtures having different concentrations of the at least two components; (c) acquiring NIR calibration spectra for each of the calibration mixtures; (d) acquiring NIR spectra for each of the components received from discrete sources; (e) inputting the respective concentration and calibration spectra for each of the calibration mixtures, and the NIR spectra for each of the components received from discrete sources, into a chemometrics software program and generating a calibration model; (f) acquiring NIR spectra for the unknown mixture of the components from the discrete sources and providing the NIR spectra to the calibration model of (e); and (g) calculating the relative concentration of each of the components from the discrete sources utilizing the calibration model of step (e).