Study of a Method for Measuring Hydrogen Gas Concentration Using a Photon-counting Raman Lidar System

This paper discusses the development of a Raman lidar system for remote detection and measurement of hydrogen gas by using a photon counter. The Raman signal of the hydrogen gas is very weak and has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. The photon counter has the advantage of improving the signal-to-noise ratio, because it has a discriminator to eliminate the background noise from the Raman signal of the hydrogen gas. Therefore, a small and portable Raman lidar system was developed using a low-power pulsed laser and a photon-counter system to measure the hydrogen gas concentration remotely. To verify the capability of measuring hydrogen gas using the developed photon-counting Raman lidar system, experiments were carried out using a gas chamber in which it is possible to adjust the hydrogen gas concentration. As a result, our photon-counting Raman lidar system is seen to measure a minimum concentration of 0.65 vol.% hydrogen gas at a distance of 10 m.