GVS Faster and Safer

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

A gas leakage can be catastrophic. In 1988, an undetected gas leak led to an explosion at the oil production platform Piper Alpha in the North Sea killing 167 people. The total insured loss of about €1.9 B made it one of the costliest manmade catastrophes ever1. However, history has various examples of such accidents with devastating consequences for human lives, material costs and negative environmental impact. Gas detectors are used to detect gas leaks, often as a part of a safety system. Conventional gas detectors are point or line detectors. However, the traditional systems have several shortcomings causing delayed detection and alarm: • since they are only measuring in an exact point or along a line, the gas needs to be drawn to the vicinity of the detector, making the degree of detection weather dependent. • their coverage is limited to a specific point or a line, thus many detectors are needed to cover a large area. • they do not identify the source of the leakage, meaning that personnel are needed to locate the leakage point. The mentioned limitations, together with the emergence of novel technologies for detection – namely Optical Gas Imaging (OGI), – suggests that conventional point and line detectors and associated technologies will become obsolete. A gas imaging camera system will give live imagery for an operator to assess the situation. The GasOptics’ Gas Vision System (GVS®), working by the gas correlation spectroscopic principle, will also visualize otherwise invisible gas and show it color-coded in live video of gas from a leak. The system is also, by use of image analysis algorithms, able to autonomously give alarms for a number of situations that may arise, such as gas or flame alarm. This development project will focus on new models with faster and safer detection compared to traditional gas vision systems.