Determination of Methanol in Gasoline and Ethanol Fuels by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography

Gasoline and ethanol fuels have been adulterated with methanol in Brazil. Methanol is not permitted in concentrations greater than 0.5 vol% due its toxicity but its lower price stimulates the adulteration. A new approach for quantitative analysis of methanol in gasoline and ethanol fuels is reported employing high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with refractive index (RI) detector on C18 column (250 × 4.6 mm, 5 µm) using deionized water as mobile phase (0.6 mL min−1). The method showed good analytical performance in terms of linearity for methanol concentration ranging from 0.5 to 4.5 vol% (coefficient of determination (R2) = 0.999) and from 4.0 to 12.0 vol% (R2 = 0.998). The recoveries (accuracy) values ranged from 98.6 to 103.2%. The results indicated that the developed method is accurate and suitable for the determination of methanol in gasoline with ethanol and ethanol fuel as an alternative procedure to gas chromatography (GC)-based techniques.