DETERMINATION OF CORES OR BUILDING BLOCKS AND RECONSTRUCTION OF PARENT MOLECULES IN HEAVY PETROLEUMS AND OTHER HYDROCARBON RESOURCES

摘要

The present application uses controlled fragmentation of parent molecular ions inside a mass spectrometer to determine aromatic cores or building block distribution of a petroleum resid. Various soft ionization methods, such as atmosphere pressure photoionization (APPI), atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI), electrospray ionization (ESI), and MALDI etc. are used to generate molecular ions or pseudo -molecular ions. Ultra high resolution mass spectrometry by FTICR-MS provides elemental formulae of all ions. Parent ions are then fragmented inside the mass spectrometer to generate building block information using especially collision induced association (CID). The location of the fragmentation can be in a quadropole trap before the ICR cell or inside the ICR cell. By controlling the collision energy, fragementation can be restricted to only aliphatic bonds. So aromatic structures can be assigned to the fragments. In particular, by monitoring changes in the degree of unsaturation (Z -number or DBE) on fragmentation, it becomes possible to distinguish between single and multi-core species. Thus building block distributions can be determined by the technique and the composition of the resid generated from these building blocks.