Photothermal characterization of natural gas automotive fuel

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a new, simple and fast photothermal method for characterizing the quality of natural gas used as automobile fuel. The method consists essentially in measuring the thermal properties of a sequence of natural gas diluted in nitrogen with a photothermal gas analyser time especially designed for this purpose. It is shown that the proposed method is capable of measuring the thermal properties with an accuracy of 3%. It is also shown that the proposed method is capable of detecting traces of H2S greater than 7.8 mg m−3 in the natural gas. This good accuracy, together with its fast response and portability, suggests it as a simple routine, local, checking device for natural gas quality assurance at retailers' stations.

Dual-reference photothermal imaging for the estimation of thermal effusivity of solids

“…The former controls heat transfer across the contact interface while the latter manages heat removal away from the interface. Most of the existing PT methods for effusivity and diffusivity measurement employ a parametric sweep and fitting procedure or time-resolved analysis [2,[15][16][17][18][19][20]. Due to the convoluted nature of the instrumental transfer function with the sample's PT response, such techniques are generally complicated, slow, and in many cases they require guess parameters for data fitting.…”