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FLARE EFFICIENCY MONITORING BY REMOTE INFRARED SENSING: A FEASIBILITY DEMONSTRATION
Citation:
Persky, M. AND R. Spellicy. FLARE EFFICIENCY MONITORING BY REMOTE INFRARED SENSING: A FEASIBILITY DEMONSTRATION. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/7-84/053 (NTIS PB84187566), 1984.
Description:
The report gives results of an evaluation, involving field tests, of passive infrared methods for use in remotely monitoring the efficiency of industrial flares. The tests utilized a general infrared measurement device, the EPA ROSE (Remote Optical Sensing of Emissions), a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) system. With this system, infrared emissions from the gaseous exhaust products of a small scale industrial flare were observed under a wide range of operating conditions, at several positions in and above the combustion zone. Major results of this evaluation include: (1) collection of a data base on flare emissions for a typical flare at several flow rates of propylene, steam, and nitrogen; (2) comparison of three runs with simultaneous extractive probe measurements indicating comparable CO and CO2 concentrations (to within 10-30%) but significantly different temperatures (differing by a factor of 2 to 4); (3) determination of a better than 20 ppm detection threshold for CO using FTIR; and (4) the conclusion that the most serious uncertainties are the spatial distributions of temperature and gas concentration, and the detectability of hydrocarbon species.