LOCATING GAS SOURCES USING A GAS SENSOR ARRAY

Locating a gas source, such as a leak of fuel gas is usually done using animal senses, but we are now developing techniques to do this job quickly, reliably and automatically. This is essentially requires the monitoring of a spatial field, using a two-dimensional array of gas sensors. The element sensors are of the semiconductor type. Because it is unusual for a gas field to be expressed by a simple diffusion model, gas source cannot be satisfactorily located using such a model. However, we have additionally used temporal data from each element sensor with promising results. The gas source can be inferred from the spatio-temporal information picked up by the sensors. We have carried out several modeling experiments with a 64-element sensor array and a test of its gas leak locating capability has yielded encouraging results. However, further work is required to improve the accuracy of the technique.