Design of a Methane Monitoring System for Landfill and Duct Emissions

Methane is released from waste disposal areas as a result from anaerobic decay of food. Methane causes more greenhouse effects than carbon dioxide so a methane monitoring system is required to warn its release from gas emitting environments. The low explosive limit of methane is 5% in ambient air, so gas leakage is dangerous and can produce explosions. An entire head monitoring system was built around a MQ-4 methane gas sensor as it is cheap and reliable. The design proves to be flexible enough as it can measure CH4 emissions in ducts, CH4 in landfills at different depths and even in cattle barns. The measuring system head consists of a suction pump, solenoids, and a methane sensor. Measurements are taken 13 seconds after methane gas sucking. A timing of 100 seconds is required for purging the chamber before the second solenoid is turned-on. Devices temperature during operation was sampled with a thermal Flir-One camera and solenoid coil temperature was of 24.9˚C after a continuous operation of 30 seconds. As hoses for emission sampling become larger time for sampling increases as well as energy consumption.

Combining TDLAS and multi-fusion algorithms for methane gas concentration detection

High-precision methane gas detection is of great importance in industrial safety, energy production and environmental protection, etc. However, in the existing measurement techniques, the methane gas concentration information is susceptible to noise, which leads to its useful signal being drowned by noise. A fusion algorithm of variational modal decomposition(VMD) and improved wavelet threshold filtering is proposed, which is used in combination with tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy(TDLAS) to implement a non-contact, high-resolution methane gas concentration detection. The fusion algorithm can perform noise reduction and further segmentation of the methane gas detection signal. And the simulation and experiment verify the effectiveness of the fusion algorithm, and the experimental results show that for the detection of air containing 10 ppm, 30 ppm, 60 ppm, 80 ppm, and 99 ppm methane, the errors are 12.75%, 8.18%, 3.37%, 2.46%, and 1.78%, respectively.

1.65μm square-FP coupled cavity semiconductor laser for methane gas detection

We report a 1.65μm square-Fabry–Pérot[FP]coupled cavity semiconductor laser for methane gas detection.The laser output optical power can reach 7.4 m W with the side mode suppression ratio about 40 d B.The wavelength tuning range is 2 nm by adjusting the FP cavity injection current,covering the methane absorption line at 1653.72 nm.The lasing wavelength can also be tuned by adjusting the square microcavity injection current or temperature,respectively.Methane gas detection is successfully demonstrated utilizing this laser.