Advanced emissions monitoring from elevated gas flares for early warning system and optimization of plant operations

Real-time monitoring of emissions from elevated gas flares is very difficult and expensive due to the relative location of the source and the cost to collect samples for analysis. Elevated Analytics has developed and applied a UAV based sensor system to accomplish this task. Besides providing a snapshot in time of flare emissions, this tool also allows a plant to assess plume distribution and transport in support of an active environmental safety program. By measuring air quality in a region and coupling the readings with CFD predictions, early warning of potentially hazardous conditions is possible which can help protect plant staff and neighbors downwind of the plant. Results from these applications will be presented in this paper as examples of where this technology can be applied. Although this technology has not yet been applied to monitoring Multi-Point Ground Flares emissions, modeling results will be used to illustrate how a swarm of drones might be employed to accomplish this task which has never been attempted to date using any sensing technique.