A practical and inexpensive system for natural gas leak remote detection

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A practical and inexpensive system for natural gas leak remote detection

Ling, Bo / Zeifman, Michael / Hu, Jason

Detecting gas leaks is difficult. Gas emerges from pipelines with no warning and is blown downwind, rapidly diluting as it moves forward. Traditional point sampling detectors are therefore limited to detecting leaks at a short distance away, which means that permanently installed sensors must be carefully sited, and hand-held sensors are time-consuming to use. In this paper, a new approach for the gas leak detection is introduced. In this system, the sunlight is utilized as the light source for methane detection, which makes the system a viable choice of commercial gas leak remote detection applications. The spectral absorbance in the wave range of 850 - 950 nm is used in this system for the absorbance decomposition based on Independent Component Analysis. Hilbert Transform based shape analysis is applied to the decomposed spectral absorbance for methane detection and classification. The actual field tests have shown that this system can indeed detect the methane in a very low concentration.