Background: The concentration of natural gas components significantly impacts the transportation, storage, and utilization of natural gas. Consequently, implementing online monitoring and leak detection systems is vital to guarantee the efficient use of natural gas and to uphold its safe and stable operation. Raman spectroscopy offers distinctive benefits, including high selectivity, superior precision, and the capability to detect multiple gas components simultaneously using a single-wavelength laser. Nevertheless, the inherent weakness of the Raman effect in gases results in limited detection sensitivity for Raman spectroscopy, which may not suffice for specific practical applications.
Results: This paper presents a study investigating the detection of natural gas's complex components using a high-sensitivity multi-cavity enhanced Raman spectroscopy technique. An enhanced folded Z-shaped multi-pass cavity has been constructed to amplify the interaction length between the laser and the gas, thereby significantly boosting the Raman signal intensity by 1000 times. The detection limits for CH4, C2H6, C3H8, n-C4H10, i-C4H10, n-C5H12, i-C5H12, and n-C6H14 gases reached 0.12, 0.53, 0.55, 0.67, 0.28, 0.46, 0.34, and 0.71 ppm, respectively. The least squares method was utilized to establish quantitative relationships between the characteristic peak heights and the concentrations of gases, encompassing both single-component and mixed multi-component systems. Additionally, the natural gas samples were configured and subsequently detected and analyzed.
Significance: As proposed in this paper, the results indicate that the MPC-CERS system boasts several advantages, including a low detection limit, high quantitative accuracy, excellent detection repeatability, and robust system stability. Furthermore, its capability for real-time monitoring is well-suited to meet the gas detection requirements in practical applications. Consequently, the research presented in this paper offers innovative insights for the online tracking and leak detection of distributed energy natural gas systems.
Keywords: Least square method; Multi-pass cavity; Natural gas components; Raman spectroscopy.
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