Results

Time (min)

Reid Vapour Pressure (RVP), kPa

Types of oil

Petrol

Kerosene

Diesel

28.6

2.0

0.7

10

29.2

2.1

0.6

15

29.1

2.0

0.6

Average

29.0

2. 0

0.6

TABLE 1: Table of Reid Vapour Pressure (RVP) for different types of oil

Discussion
Reid vapor pressure is a common measure of the volatility of gasoline. Gasoline and
other fuels have the ability to vaporize, or change from liquid to vapor, when exposed to heat
or air at temperatures above the boiling point of the fuel, and one test to measure this is the
Reid vapor pressure test. This test measures the pressure of a vapor and liquid mixture in a
closed container at 37.8C. The true vapour pressure of a fuel or a crude oil can be estimated
by using the methods in the API-TDB once the RVP of a fuel is known. A measurement used
by the petroleum industry is the Reid vapor pressure, which measures the vapor pressure in a
closed container at one temperature, without first removing the air. This measurement allows
petroleum engineers to compare different fuels, or to show the effects of performance
additives.
In this experiment, the objectives are to determine the Reid vapor pressure of petroleum
products and to compare the Reid vapor pressure of different petroleum products. Reid Vapor
Pressure apparatus consists of two chamber a vapor chamber and liquid chamber, pressure
gauges and a water bath. There are 3 materials given was kerosene, petrol and diesel. First,
the water bath was left for about 5 minutes to reach the temperature of 37.8C. This is
because the functions of Reid vapor pressure experiment does not eliminate air or water
vapor from the sample, but compares all fuels at 37.8C. After that, all materials were
recorded every 5 minutes from 5, 10 and 15 minutes. An average results are recorded to get a
punctual result from all materials by using pressure digital meter (kPa).

Based on the result, the average of pressure for kerosene is 2.0kPa, petrol 29.0kPa and
diesel is 0.6kPa. In this experiment petrol showed high pressure followed by kerosene and
diesel. This is because petrol viscosity is lower than diesel viscosity. Besides diesel has a high
viscosity, because of that it can vaporize easily. As the effect the diesel pressure become
lower. The lower the viscosity of a materials, the higher the pressure. Petrol is more volatile
than diesel, not only because of the base constituents, but because of the additives that are put
into it. Pressure for kerosene is between of petrol and diesel.
During this experiment, results obtained was good, so there is no error in the result in this
experiment. This is because the result is same with theory. One of the possibilities that
contribute to this good result was the time taken was fixed at a 5 minutes base. To maintain
more accurate result, time taken must be accurate to get accurate result.