1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a sensor and method for detecting natural gas in the atmosphere.
2. Background of the Invention
Gas correlation is known to be one of the more sensitive optical measurement techniques which uses infrared emission from or absorption of a gas of interest to estimate the concentration of that gas in the sensing environment. The principle of measurement is based on a spectral correlation between a target gas of interest and a correlation gas normally the same as the target gas and contained in a cell inside the sensor. In a typical application, the correlation cell is filled with the target gas of interest to a specific pressure (i.e., concentration) to provide an optical depth at the center of the absorption lines of specific region of the molecular spectral band. The gas cell design (i.e., gas pressure and path length) is designed to obtain maximum sensitivity for the sensor near the target gas burden (i.e., the concentration times the pass length).
In general, the optimum gas cell provides a sufficiently large optical depth at the line centers of the absorption band of the gas of interest but not so large that the individual lines are well separated from each other after line broadening. When the spectral band includes a large number of absorption lines of varying strength, optimization becomes quite involved requiring numerical simulation or extensive experiments. To complicate the problem further, optimization typically involves the design of a filter bandwidth for the spectrum of interest. In general, a wide bandwidth is desired to increase the signal throughput and thus the sensitivity. While a conventional laser system may have enough brightness to be used, if it can be tuned to the desired infrared range, a conventional laser system is not suitable due to the narrow spectral line features of the laser radiation.
Passive gas correlation techniques as described by Lee and Zwick, 1985 and Ward and Zwick, 1975 (referenced below) use natural infrared radiation sources from either the ground or the sky radiance depending on the environment. The performance of passive gas correlation techniques depend on the temperature difference between the atmospheric gases and the Earth's surface. Also changes in the surface reflectivity and inhomogeneity in the background can give rise to serious errors with the passive technique and make it difficult to quantify the gas concentration in real time.
Active gas correlation techniques have been implemented in the laboratory (i.e., a stationary setup) whereby a high temperature source can be directly located in the sensor field of view. A high temperature blackbody source can be used as an active illumination source, but utilization of a blackbody source is not practical in many applications. Conventional high temperature blackbody sources have a limited emitting surface area and are substantially smaller than the field of view (FOV) or foot print of the sensor. Even though the temperature of the active source can be a magnitude or more higher than the room temperature source, the effective radiance of such a source at the infrared region does not increase significantly due to the specific nature of blackbody radiation. Thus, normally a large area low temperature blackbody source is used for active gas correlation measurement in the laboratory setting.
Active gas correlation techniques also differs from differential absorption lidar (DIAL) commonly used for remote gas measurement (Warren, 1996, Quagliano, et al, 1997, Prasad and Geiger, 1996). DIAL measurement uses two different wavelengths, one on the absorption line and one off the absorption line, provided by either two lasers or one laser whose wavelength can be switched (Lee et al, 2004, Prasad et al, 1998). Active gas correlation techniques utilize a single output pulse centered on the absorption line of the target gas. However, the spectral bandwidth of the laser should be broad enough to at least partially overlap the chosen absorption line (or lines) of the target gas, unlike the DIAL technique wherein the laser spectral bandwidth is commonly chosen to be much narrower than the width of the absorption line. One advantage of an active gas correlation technique over DIAL is that the active gas correlation sensor makes two measurements simultaneously on an identical column-content concentration of target gas, while the DIAL system's sequential measurement intrinsically probes different columns differing by the pulse sequence, different albedos for the two pulses and/or wavelengths, and speed of the platform movement. The following articles describing the development of gas correlation techniques are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety:
In one embodiment of the present invention, there is provided a method for measuring target gas concentrations in an atmosphere. The method emits in the atmosphere a laser beam tuned to a molecular absorption line of a target gas, the laser beam having a spectral bandwidth greater than a full width of the molecular absorption line of the target gas. The method receives a reflected signal affected by gas absorption of the target gas, divides and directs the received signal into a first optical path and a second optical path (including in one of the paths a correlation gas cell filled with a predetermined concentration of the target gas), detects transmitted signals through the first optical path and the second optical path, and calculates a target gas concentration by comparing a first signal transmitted through the first optical path to a second signal transmitted through the second optical path.
In one embodiment of the present invention, there is provided an apparatus for measuring target gas concentrations in an atmosphere that includes a laser source tunable to a specific molecular absorption line of a target gas and configured to emit in the atmosphere a laser beam having a spectral bandwidth greater than a full width of the molecular absorption line of the target gas. The apparatus includes a receiver configured to receive a reflected signal affected by gas absorption of the target gas in an optical path of the laser beam, and includes at least one detector configured to detect transmitted signals through the first optical path and the second optical path.
It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description of the invention and the following detailed description are exemplary, but are not restrictive of the invention.
A more complete appreciation of the present invention and many attendant advantages thereof will be readily obtained as the same becomes better understood by reference to the following detailed description when considered in connection with the accompanying drawings, wherein:
Referring now to the drawings, wherein like reference numerals designate identical, or corresponding parts throughout the several views,
When there is no target gas present in the path of the beam outside the sensor receiver 2, the incoming radiation will only be strongly absorbed by the respective ones of cells 6 and 10 (i.e., the correlation cells), but not by the reference cell 4. Thus, the net signal difference (i.e., “on” channel of one of the correlation cells minus “off” channel of the reference cell) will be negative. On the other hand, when the incoming radiation has been absorbed by target gas in the atmosphere (i.e., outside the sensor), the signal from the “on” channel is not substantially different from the previous case (where there was no target gas) because the additional optical thickness of the target gas when combined with the already large optical depth of the correlation cell makes no substantial change (i.e., it is still optically thick). Thus, no net change occurs. In contrast however, the off channel signal will be reduced by the amount of the absorption by the target gas. As a result, the net difference signal (on minus off signal) will be less negative than for the no target gas case.
In one embodiment of the present invention, inter-channel sensitivity calibration balances the off/on channel signal in the absence of the target gas in the incoming radiation. This calibration balances the optical efficiency difference between the on and off channels due to the correlation gas absorption as well as difference in transmittance of other optical components in the beam path. To ensure that the two channels provide nearly equal response to equal signal inputs, the calibration determines if it is necessary to compensate either one or the other channel. This occurs if the optical efficiency of either of the two channels is significantly different from the other. Gas sensitivity can be further calibrated in the laboratory using known quantities of the target gas at varying concentrations.
In operation, the incoming laser optical signal from the receiver telescope is split and one portion is sent through the cell to one detector and the second and third portion are sent directly to the second and third detector (see
In infrared detection, the low frequency (l/f) noise and baseline drift are important factors. Baseline drift can be corrected for example by measuring the detector signal before and after every pulse to correct for any drift and noise. The laser pulse returns can be measured in the three channels nearly if not in fact simultaneously, and are recorded for example as signal (A) signal (B) and signal (C). Signal (A) represents the direct laser atmospheric column return signal through the air filled reference cell, and signal (B) represents the return signal that passes through the methane filled gas correlation cell and signal (C) represents the return signal that passes through the ethane filled gas correlation cell.
A number of processing and control modules 42 are shown in
In one embodiment of the sensor system 20 of the present invention (with the laser operating at a repetition rate of for example 100 Hz), measurements can be completed rapidly which allows an increased area coverage from moving platforms and achieves a spatial resolution of the order of meters. Further improvements in sensitivity can be achieved in one embodiment of the present invention by signal averaging. In one embodiment of the sensor system 20 of the present invention, an energy monitor 52 can be utilized to determine laser energy values on a shot by shot basis and can be used to normalize the signals for laser energy fluctuations.
The sensor system 20 can be a mobile sensor. The sensor system 20 can perform aerial surveys over large regions for natural gas (e.g., natural gas, petroleum products, methane, ethane) and other related hydrocarbons when operated from mobile platforms, such as trucks or low-altitude aircraft. The sensor system 20 can achieve both high sensitivity and high measurement throughput rate by combining a gas correlation technique with a wide bandwidth tunable mid-IR laser.
The sensor system 20 can include a lidar sensor that measures the total column-content concentration of methane in the atmospheric path below the aircraft by reflecting the laser pulses off the ground, water or any other surface. Combining the wide band laser source with the gas correlation lidar technique provides several advantages: 1) effects of variations in the albedo of the surface are eliminated by gas correlation method where the two channel measurements that are made using the identical foot print, 2) increased accuracy and sensitivity resulting from the use of active laser source for signal measurement instead of relying on the temperature contrast between the target gas and the radiation source that is used in passive gas correlation technique, and 3) larger spatial coverage, better spatial resolution resulting from the use of a solid state laser with a high pulse repetition frequency (100 Hz).
The gas correlation technique of the present invention can eliminate or reduce interference effects due to laser signal absorption from species other than the measurement objective (e.g. methane gas). However, the laser signal absorption from other species can reduce the received signal and thus reduce the measurement sensitivity of the sensor. In order to obtain both high sensitivity and high measurement throughput rate, as detailed below, the selection of an optimal methane spectral region is utilized in one embodiment of the present invention.
Of the various atmospheric gases, water vapor is one interference gas in the mid-IR region.
Measurement of atmospheric methane by the gas correlation lidar, as in one embodiment of the present invention, has been simulated by assuming an atmospheric methane concentration of 1.7 ppm and a measurement distance (i.e., the aircraft altitude or atmospheric column) of 1 km.
In one embodiment of the present invention, the sensor can maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a given set of wavelengths and measurement geometry. The SNR can be increased by optimizing the transmitted and received laser signals and by reducing the limiting noise figure of the system. Modeling of airborne gas correlation lidar utilized a laser pulse of duration τp and energy EL transmitted into the atmosphere and showed that laser radiation is absorbed by methane along a lidar signal propagation over the two-way path from the lidar sensor to and from the Earth surface reflection. A portion of the backscattered laser signal pulse is collected with a telescope of area A. The received signal is then given by the standard lidar equation below.
The lidar collected signal energy ES from the telescope is a function of the transmitted laser energy EL, receiver optical system efficiency η, geometric overlap function Φ(R) between transmitter and receiver optical patterns, range R from telescope to Earth surface, laser surface reflectivity ρ, and the absorption K due to the species of interest. The parameters listed in Table 2 of
Using a typical thermo-electrically-cooled InAs detector (e.g., from Judson technologies), the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the active gas correlation sensor system of
the present invention was calculated. The total noise contributions to the detection process were estimated. A straightforward method is to estimate the noise equivalent power (NEP) in watts (W) from the value of detectivity D* [cm Hz1/2/W] of the detector furnished by the manufacturer. The following expression for NEP is given in terms of detector size and detectivity D*. For the chosen detector, the size is 1 mm in diameter, D* is 4.1×1010 cmHz 1/2/W, and BW is 20 MHz. The result is a NEP of 9.7×10−9 W or 9.7 nW. This result predicts a detected signal with a SNR=330 (i.e., SNR=25 db).
Based on this SNR, the limiting detectable burden concentration for the simulation of sensing methane for a 1 km column of atmosphere is 10 ppm·m with SNR of one. Since the gas-correlation technique of the present invention can use two detectors, this increases the detection limit to 14 ppm·m due to the addition of the two independent noise sources from each detector. Further, since this simulation applies to a single laser pulse, this implies that the detection limit for the present invention can be achieved in an observation time of only 0.01 sec, permitting rapid assessment of methane gas concentration.
Table 3 of
The simulation shows that the present invention can achieve <14 ppm·m in 0.01 sec (i.e., for each laser pulse at 100 pps rate). This corresponds to ˜1.5 m horizontal resolution along the aircraft trajectory for an aircraft flying at ˜100 knots ground speed. If this horizontal resolution is in excess of measurement requirements, additional measurements at the 100 pps rate can be used by averaging to improve the measurement sensitivity along the flight track (at the expense of horizontal resolution) or used in a cross-tracking scanning scheme to produce a swath-width of methane concentration measurements.
For example, a lidar unit mounted in/on a van can be used to measure pollution over a highway. In this example, a beam can be transmitted over a range that can vary from a few hundred meters up to 2 km and hit a reflector (such as a highway sign, the side of a building, tree or some other feature) or hit the ground and be reflected.
At step 1140, a pair of matched (i.e., nearly identical as from the same vendor) detectors measure the transmitted signals independently and simultaneously. For example, the two cooled-photo-detectors in
At step 1150, the detector signal is time gated to capture an entire laser pulse duration just in time upon its arrival to the detector and integrated for the duration and digitized with a high precision required for sensor sensitivity requirement. This rejects the scattered laser light from within the sensor and near field and minimizes the background effect by rejecting the cw components at all times except during the allowed gating period of only a few hundred nanoseconds as against the milliseconds of time between the pulses.
Steps 1160-1210 are optional steps used in the present invention. At step 1160, signals from off/on channels (i.e., from the first and second optical path) are calibrated for the final digitized signals from each channel by determining the optical efficiencies of the two channels. If the optical efficiencies of the two channels are unequal, the signals in each channel are corrected by multiplying by the inverse of the optical efficiency of the channel so that the channel outputs are balanced. At step 1170, the target gas signal is calculated by subtracting the reference cell signal from the correlation gas cell signal and dividing its value by the correlation cell signal for normalization. At step 1180, the signal for the absolute gas amount of the gas burden is calculated based on Beer's law and absorption strength of the specific absorption line. Gas burden defined as the product of gas concentration and the path length.
At step 1190, the altitude of the sensor platform (the path length of the laser beam) is independently measured by the arrival time of the laser return pulse. At step 1200, the atmospheric background gas concentration is computed using the measured path length of the beam and the gas burden calculated from the data over the survey area. An average background gas concentration is then determined by averaging the measurements over the entire area.
At step 1210, local excesses of the target gas are determined by subtracting the background signal from the total signal. If the target is a specific gas—e.g., methane, the atmosphere naturally contains a small amount of methane—about 1 to 2 ppm (referred here as the natural background concentration). But in areas where natural gas deposits or petroleum reserves exist, the local concentrations exceed the natural background by substantial amounts. At step 1220, a predetermined number of individual such measurements are accumulated for a fixed time period for the statistical average optimal for the application. For example, averaging for 0.1 sec, and a 100 Hz laser (i.e., 10 laser pulses) will provide a factor of 3 improvement in signal to noise ratio. Increasing the signal to noise ratio improves the sensor's sensitivity. For a 0.1 sec averaging a factor of 10 signal to noise ratio improvement will result if a 1 kHz laser is used. The averaging period that can be chosen for various embodiments depends on the application and the aircraft speed. For example on an aircraft flying at 100 m/sec, it means that a 10 m spatial region is covered during the 0.1 sec averaging. Thus depending on what is the spatial resolution required the averaging time and laser pulse repetition rate are chosen.
The above methods can minimize the effect of background radiation from for example the solar radiation, ambient radiation, and other thermal radiation originating from the ground, correlation gas cell and all other optical components in the sensor package. The spectral brightness of the illuminating laser pulse used in the present invention is many orders of magnitude greater than that of any of the black body sources conventionally used.
The above methods can be highly selective for a given hydrocarbon gas by choice of the optimal absorption line with proper absorption strength and isolation from other interference gas absorption lines, and are applicable for various gases due to the abundance of the absorption lines in the mid infrared region.
The above methods can provide absolute sensitivity of the gas sensing regardless environmental variation and laser pulse energy variation due to the differential measurement and radiometric calibration.
The above methods can permit a large aerial mapping of the gas concentration with high accuracy and precision based on the absolute sensitivity of the system. The stability of the sensitivity is one requirement for many airborne applications covering a large area such as exploration or environmental studies, as well as a long term trend study at a fixed location. The special features of the gas correlation technique—where the return signal is split into two parts and then ratioed bring remarkable stability to the measurement by removing the effects of laser energy fluctuations, variations in reflectivity of the ground, etc. Thus, it does not depend as heavily on either laser performance stability or structural stability as other techniques such as DIAL do. The sealed Mid-IR laser enclosure design and construction allows the laser to stably operate over long periods of time.
The above methods can reject low frequency components from the received reflected signal. For example, low frequency noise (the l/f noise) that is present in the detector during the measurement can be removed by measuring the detector signal background just before firing the laser and subtracting it from the signal.
The above methods can provide a common field of view (FOV) for both the first optical path and the second optical path. The techniques discussed above can utilize separate gas cells, with each cell filled with a different target gas and therefore configured to absorb radiation at a specific laser wavelength chosen for that gas. Each cell is thus able to measure the target gas with which it is filled. Accordingly, the optical beams can be passed through different gas cells, and the laser can be tuned to the absorption region specific for each of the gases. For example, the concentration of at least one of methane, ethane, propane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and oxides of nitrogen can be measured.
The above methods can use a surrogate spectral material in which simulants that can be used instead of the real gas material. For example non-toxic simulants such a SF6 (sulfur hexafluoride), DMMP (dimethyl methylphosphonate), thioglycol (also known as 2-mercaptoethanol: HSCH2CH2OH), etc are used as surrogates for chemical warfare agents (such as nerve agents, blister agents—mustard, etc).
Numerous modifications and variations on the present invention are possible in light of the above teachings. It is, therefore, to be understood that within the scope of the accompanying claims, the invention may be practiced otherwise than as specifically described herein.