[Stoves] Small NDIR CO2 meter + more

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Gas and Temp Measuring Friends

 

There is an article
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video
-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertise
d/#more-49446 reporting in great detail an attempt to reproduce the
experiment shown by the Climate Change 101 video
http://vimeo.com/climaterealityproject/climate101 . That may or may not
interest you. It was the technologies used that captured my attention.

 

During this replication of the Climate 101 greenhouse gas experiment it was
necessary to source a couple of very useful instruments (as far as we are
concerned). 

 

One is the TIM 10, a combined CO2, humidity and temperature indicator. It
also has the time and date. It can go up to 5000 ppm CO2 and that will do
for stove emissions if the excess air ratio is a bit higher than 200%.  That
covers most cookers that are not well enclosed.  If you are trying to use a
hood this range will usually do. It is not exactly 'real time' but it can be
helpful as an indicator of improved combustion or lower EA. It can give the
equivalent of a 'ranging shot' - put you in the territory.

 

There is a great (and very compact) SensaTronics 16 channel temperature
logger with a LAN port on it - the E16. I had not seen this one before
either. It even has an internal webserver! Things are improving fast. I
called them.  They told me the unit used has since been updated to a U-16
and we are discussing what the temperature ranges it can cover. The
salesperson didn't seem to be aware that they could read higher temperature
probes simply by having a larger look-up table for the voltage ranges. More
later.

 

Seeking a second opinion on the temperature, the USB-2-LCD+ logger was used
which is a humidity and temperature logger that also reports the dew point
in the software. For us this is only helpful for tracking the humidity in a
hood because it will not take a high temperature (only goes up to 176 F) but
could be used in a hood. The usefulness of this is tracking when the
moisture left the fuel. We seem not to pay much attention to this but it
will emerge as important in future as lab testing improves and people
understand the importance of real time measurements.

 

I am following up that humidity issue this week with Picarro in California.
They have some moisture and CO2 meters that work in an unusual way (not
NDIR). Steve Garrett at Penn State says he can detect moisture at a high
temperature (like 700 C) using a resonant acoustic cavity. More on that too,
and if either one works out.

 

Regards

Crispin

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20111019/5c3d797c/attachment.html>