(117o) Early Warning Solution for Gas Leaks

Automated early detection of gas leaks and tracking of moving gas clouds in case of an incident – this combination of risk prevention and incident mitigation was the design task for the early warning solution that we installed in an ammonia complex. The site in close vicinity to a densely populated campus requires the warning of a release incident at any point within minutes. Once ammonia is in the air, the propagation of the moving cloud has to be tracked live until it reaches the fence. A remote monitoring solution is the logical answer to the task. Remote monitoring covers large areas and can locate a gas at any point because the sensor doesn’t have to be within the gas cloud.

Warning for ammonia releases becomes an urgent problem in light of increasing demands for green fuels. Hydrogen fuel is safely stored and transported in form of ammonia. Large scale storage sites and loading stations for ships, trucks or trains demand reliable monitoring. As of today, there is no such technology available. Gas sensors pick up only local concentration values without information on the total amount of gas that is released.

While the detection and visualization of an ammonia cloud was the primary target of the installation, the early warning includes other process gases, both flammable as well as toxic gases from the surrounding production sites. The early warning solution therefore is based on spectroscopic analysis (FTIR spectroscopy). This technology allows the secure identification of hundreds of different chemicals from large distances.

We present the installation of a sensing solution that detects gas leaks at any point of the plant from the distance. The gas cloud is assessed in total so the location, dimension and propagation can be monitored live.

For a brief video introduction please follow the link