Industrial SO₂ emissions monitoring using a portable multi-channel gas analyzer with an optimized retrieval algorithm

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we demonstrate achieving accurate industrial SO2 emissions monitoring using a portable multi-channel gas analyzer with an optimized retrieval algorithm. The introduced analyzer features with large dynamic measurement range and correction of interferences from other co-existing infrared absorbers, e.g., NO, CO, CO2, NO2, CH4, HC, N2O and H2O. Both effects have been the major limitations of industrial SO2 emissions monitoring. The multi-channel gas analyzer measures 11 different wavelength channels simultaneously in order to achieve correction of several major problems of an infrared gas analyzer, including system drift, conflict of sensitivity, interferences among different infrared absorbers and limitation of measurement range. The optimized algorithm makes use of a 3rd polynomial rather than a constant factor to quantify gas-to-gas interference. The measurement results show good performance in both linear and nonlinear range, thereby solving the problem that the conventional interference correction is restricted by the linearity of both intended and interfering channels. The result implies that the measurement range of the developed multi-channel analyzer can be extended to the nonlinear absorption region. The measurement range and accuracy are evaluated by experimental laboratory calibration. An excellent agreement was achieved with a Pearson correlation coefficient (r2) of 0.99977 with measurement range from ~5 ppmv to 10 000 ppmv and measurement error <2 %. The instrument was also deployed for field measurement. Emissions from 3 different factories were measured. The emissions of these factories have been characterized with different co-existing infrared absorbers, covering a wide range of concentration levels. We compared our measurements with the commercial SO2 analyzers. The overall good agreements are achieved.