Automatic Flare-Stack Monitoring

Flare stacks must be monitored continuously to ensure ignition of released gases during the plant operation. Generally, the process of flare detection refers to detecting the presence or absence of a flare. Flare monitoring adds the capability of tracking the size of the flare to this process. By setting lower and upper monitoring boundaries, an alarm can be generated if the flare becomes too small or too big. Reliable flare-stack monitoring becomes crucial to ensure that no unburned toxic or waste gas is released into the atmosphere, causing environmental issues and possible fire hazards. It also gives the operator an extra handle to optimize the production process. In this paper, we introduce an automatic flare-detection and monitoring system. Our user-friendly system is computer-vision-based, plug-andplay, and designed as a built-in part of the camera. By taking advantage of the geometrical properties of the flare as well as temporal information obtained by video analytics, we create a monitoring system that is robust to various parameters such as wind direction. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present an automatic flare-stack-monitoring system with flare-size tracking and automatic event signaling. Our presented system has been tested for live monitoring in the Rotterdam Botlek area, The Netherlands. The preliminary results illustrate a reliable system that is free of false alarms.