| Monitoring industrial furnace gases for temperature, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide can be paired with process control to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, fuel costs, energy use, and material loss. Currently, the steel-making industry has no viable method to obtain such data. The furnace environment provides a unique measurement challenge with its high temperatures, vibrations, and dust loading. A new passive infrared sensor has been designed specifically for these applications. It consists of light collecting optics, a mechanical chopper, a grating spectrometer and a 64-pixel pyroelectric array. This thesis describes the experiments used to calibrate the raw signal into units of radiance (+/- 2.5%) vs. wavelength (+/- 5nm), derive gas and background brightness temperatures (+/- 0.2%), and demonstrate sensitivity to concentrations of both carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Lab results show that correlation techniques may be used for retrieving relative gas concentrations, and industry results are promising. |
