Determination Of Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPHs) In Weathered Oil Contaminated Soil

Abstract

A new measurement method of weathered crude oil in soil was reviewed. There is no standard method for the extraction of crude oil from soil. Therefore, a basic initial test was carried out and several methods such as gravimetric and gas chromatographymass spectrometry (GC-MS) with various parameters such as weight, solvent and time were altered to improve the measurement process. The gravimetric process was demonstrated to be the most effective for quantifying weathered contamination crude oil in contaminated soil. The dichloromethane DCM, mixture of DCM: hexane (1:1 v/v mix) and mixture of acetone: hexane (1:1 v/v mix) was used to investigate the ability of solvent extraction technique for removing weathered crude oil from soil under various extraction conditions. The mixtures of acetone: hexane (1:1 v/v mix) were demonstrated to be the most effective in removing total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) from contaminated soils on average of 341,000 mg/kg. 5 g and 1 g weights of the oil-contaminated samples were studied to select the best weight depending on contamination level. The out comes shown that the 1g of contaminated soil was cleaned in three cycles whilst the 5g of contaminated soil required six cycles. This paper indicated that the selected parameters were able to recover about 97.20% of the weathered crude oil. Also, these parameters were influenced with character of high efficiency, low cost, low toxicity and short time.