Remote quantification of methane leaks in the laboratory and in biogas plants
S. Dierks, und A. Kroll. International Journal of Remote Sensing42 (20):
7978–-8003(2021)
Zusammenfassung
Gas leaks can occur not only in industrial environments such as refineries but also in biogas plants. The main compound of the emitted biogas is methane, which is a greenhouse gas with a higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). Considering that the climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gases are becoming more and more important, it is crucial to be able to not only localize but also to quantify methane leakages. Based on the quantification of methane leakages, not only the effect of the effluent gases to the atmosphere but also the economic loss can be estimated. Another aspect is safety: biogas consists of different gases, mainly methane which can create an explosive mixture with air, but also hydrogen sulphide, which is toxic. This motivates remotely measuring the gas emissions. In this paper a remote measurement system and model is presented to estimate the methane volume flow due to a leak based on infrared optical sensors and sensor data fusion. The sensors are calibrated and the system is tested in the laboratory as well as in biogas plants. The laboratory results show that the measurement model allows an estimation of the methane volume flow if the assumptions of the measurement model are met. The highest relative deviations occur for small reference methane volume flows while the absolute deviations are similar. In contrast to the laboratory measurements the results of the measurements in biogas plants show partially high deviations from the reference. These deviations can have multiple reasons which cannot be determined for each single case because many of them occur at the same time. Future work includes improvements in order to reduce the deviations of the methane volume flow estimation. This could be done not only by improving the processing steps of the velocity estimation but also by using more accurate sensors
