Development of A drone based Hydro carbon sensor for gas flux measurements from oil and gas production

Abstract

Air pollution is considered the single largest environmental health risk worldwide due to its enormous impact on climate change and human health. It takes an adverse toll not only on human morbidity and mortality, but also affects the geographical distribution of many infectious diseases and natural disasters due to the result ing climate change. Corrective actions to reduce air pollution and its impact on the ecosystem thus require a good understanding of its sources, concentration of the pol lutants and their interaction with the atmosphere. A light weight, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-borne system has been developed to measure emissions of harmful trace gases like Sulphur Dioxide (SO2), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), a wide range of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), and Particulate Matter (PM2.5, PM10), with the main application areas being ship emissions and oil refineries. The device is also equipped with auxiliary sensors to detect wind intensity and direction as well as am bient parameters such as temperature, humidity, altitude, positional co-ordinates; all in real-time. The data is relayed to the controller location by means of a ra dio transceiver to enable on-site analysis and logging of measured parameters. The objective of the work was to: a) Characterize effect of EMI on the small sensor outputs and implement corrective measures for diminishing it, b) Calibrate the sen sors for different gas concentrations in a controlled environment so as to obtain a linear relationship and determine the cross-sensitivity for SO2 and NO2 at different concentrations, c) Calibrate the Photo-ionization detector (PID) sensor against a reference and obtain the concentration curve in terms of sensor sensitivity, and d) Design an efficient, light-weight system with carefully weighed trade-offs between sensors used, their size, dimensions, power consumption and overall performance. A remarkable mitigation of EMI is achieved after implementing the corrective measures. The calibrated system was tested in a field campaign where more than a hundred ships were measured over a span of seven days. The results were used to calculate fuel sulfur content (FSC) and fuel NOx content, which is discussed in detail in the results section.