Proof of Concept of High-Temperature Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry for Two-Dimensional Simulated Distillation of Crude Oils

In this work, a reversed-phase high-temperature comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC × GC–TOFMS) approach for the qualitative and quantitative analyses of crude oils will be presented. The proposed setup provides the best utilization of the two-dimensional separation space for carbon numbers between C₁₀ and C₆₀. Visual Basic Script (VBS) was successfully applied for data processing to achieve comprehensive classification of the main compound classes. On this basis, crude oils from different origins could be compared by their composition. Real distillation cuts following ASTM D2892 and ASTM D5236 were applied for the development of area-based templates representing virtual boiling point cuts. By this approach, a quantification of an artificial crude oil sample with a defined initial boiling point was evaluated versus the quantitative result according to ASTM D7169 (one-dimensional simulated distillation for high boiling samples, hereinafter 1D-SimDist), and by this, a two-dimensional simulated distillation (2D-SimDist) was successfully developed.