| abstract |
Determination of a desired parameter of a hydrocarbon, such as octane number, cetane number or Reid vapour pressure, includes the steps of providing a hydrocarbon to be evaluated (18), obtaining a near-infrared signal from absorption measurements of the hydrocarbon (20), codifying the near-infrared signal by providing baseline correction and reducing the signal to a number of points (22), providing a neural network trained in a plurality of known hydrocarbon fuels for correlating the number of points to the desired parameter (24), and processing the number of points with the neural network so as to determine the desired parameter (26). |