Optical gas-imaging (OGI) technology has been developed and can be used to detect leaks of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from process equipment. Using OGI to detect leaks is more effective than using the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Method 21 because OGI is visual, making detection faster, and can survey an area instead of one component at a time. Although OGI can be very effective in detecting leaks, it does not provide a quantitative measure of leak rate (LR), hindering its adoption as a true alternative to Method 21. This paper describes development of quantitative OGI (QOGI) technology.
Method and Preliminary Results
Approaches have been proposed to establish a quantitative relationship between the pixel intensity difference with and without a plume (ΔI) and the product of concentration in ppm and path length in meters (ppm·m) for a gas column represented by a pixel in the infrared (IR) image for a given temperature differential (ΔT) between ambient air and the background. This quantitative relationship has been confirmed with a study showing that there is a monotonically increasing relationship between ΔI and concentration for uniform black background that was temperature controlled.
