Hand-Held, Battery Operated Trace Gas Analyzer For Measuring GHG Sources

Landfills are the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions in the U.S. However, the accurate quantification of these emissions are limited by difficulties in measuring and characterizing the time-varying meteorological conditions with the detail needed to produce a reliable model for predicting the transport of methane from the sources to the receptors. The tracer method, in which another gas (such as acetylene) is released at a known rate from the same location, is a promising method for determining total methane emissions from landfills because it does not depend upon characterizing time-varying meteorological conditions. In order to carry out such a tracer measurement, a mobile, highly-sensitive dual-species analyzer, which can be moved through the overlapping plumes, is required. This project will extend the capabilities of existing instrumentation based on wavelength-scanned cavity ring down spectroscopy (WS-CRDS) to develop a hand-held, compact, high-speed analyzer that can measure concentrations of acetylene and methane from landfills at the hundreds of parts-per-trillion level in less than two seconds. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee This shoe-box-size, low-cost analyzer would be ideal for tracer studies focused on either determining the total methane emission rate of a landfill or for locating emission hot-spots. Many other market opportunities ¿ where compact, high speed, high precision, measurements are required ¿ could be addressed by simply changing lasers and the algorithms for spectral acquisition and fitting