Stability Improvement of the TDLAS-Based CO Monitoring Module in a Coal Mine by Using a Spectral Denoising Algorithm Based on SVR

Abstract

CO gas is not only lethal but also a significant forecasting indicator for the spontaneous combustion of coal mines. It is imperative that monitoring modules for CO gas that work well in the coal mine environment are available. A feasible solution is the detection of CO by using monitoring modules based on tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) over a mid-infrared waveband near 4.6 μm. However, in most cases, the mid-infrared TDLAS-based CO monitoring module tends to introduce severe interference fringe noise into the TDLAS spectral backgrounds which is difficult to filter out using traditional spectral filtering methods, reducing the detection performance of the module. In order to filter out the noise and improve the stability of the module in complex coal mine environments, this work proposed an algorithm based on support vector regression (SVR) to extract the TDLAS spectral backgrounds. Spectral analysis indicates that the TDLAS spectral background can be predicted over the entire scanning spectrum range by using this algorithm, and the noise in the spectral background can be effectively filtered out when calculating the absorbance spectrum based on the Lambert–Beer law. Compared to extracting spectral backgrounds using the traditional least square polynomial fit, the obtained correlation coefficients between regression models of spectral backgrounds and corresponding training point datasets were increased from below 0.998 to above 0.999. The peak-to-peak value of the obtained N2 absorbance spectrum was suppressed below 0.022 from nearly 0.045. The signal-to-noise ratio of the obtained 25 ppm CO absorbance spectrum was increased to 13.35 from 6.95. A CO monitoring module polluted by dust was used to conduct experiments to further test the SVR-based algorithm. The experiment results showed that after programming the SVR-based algorithm to the module, the estimated limit of detection of the module was reduced to 5.46 ppm from 29.08 ppm, and all the absolute measuring errors of the standard CO gases with different low concentrations were reduced to less than 4 ppm from a majority of the errors of more than 10 ppm, compared to least square polynomial fit. The CO monitoring module could still maintain the performance of high-precision quantitative detection when using the SVR-based algorithm even if it had been polluted severely. So, the CO monitoring module has good adaptability to harsh field environments, and its operation stability can be effectively improved by using the algorithm proposed in this work.