Fenceline, Air & Flare Gas Monitoring
Fenceline, Air & Flare Gas Monitoring
Environmental Applications for Real-Time Mass Spectrometer Gas Analyzers
By Chuck Decarlo, Business Development & Marketing Manager
See how the recent updates to 40 CFR 60 and 63 have increased EPA regulation of flare gas and fenceline monitoring requirements is prompting the need to adopt real-time gas analysis solutions at many sites, ranging from oil refineries to downstream hydrocarbon manufacturing.
Industrial mass spectrometers provide fast, continuous updates of the necessary compliance parameters as well as additional information for overall process safety and control. This presentation showed many examples and data from fenceline, flare gas, fuel gas and air monitoring environmental applications using a real-time, mass spectrometer gas analyzer.
Mass spectrometry is an analytical technique that utilizes the molecular mass of substances for identification and quantitation. Gas and vapors are ionized inside a vacuum chamber. The ions are then filtered using electric fields generated by the quadrupole. Ions of a particular mass are selected to go to the detector. The composition of the gas sample is calculated from measured ion current and reported to the user in real-time.
By its very nature, a mass spectrometer is a generalist: there is no class of molecules that is unable to analyze and it’s fast. Also, if you have to measure 80 or 100 sample points spread throughout your facility that would mean many dedicated analyzers, and all of the required maintenance. A mass spec can do it all.