Abstract

Combustion is at the core of many of industrial processes where heat transfer occurs. The standard setup controls the flame behavior by measuring the composition of the residual gases discharged to the atmosphere. However, such a solution involves an unavoidable transport delay due to the distance between the flame and the measurement sample, in addition to intrinsic delay in the sensor. In this work, we propose the optically monitoring of the combustion inferring the state of the process by the inclusion of a spectrometer to calculates a novel set of optical variables. Such approach provides an improvement in the monitoring and control of the process by calculating an accurate estimation of the energy efficiency by measuring the flame temperature Tf, the total radiation Radt proportional to the heat transfer; or by measuring the radicals ratio C2*/CH*. We then present the fundamentals of a novel proposition for control and optimization of industrial combustion processes, based on the use of flame emissions information measured by the spectrometer.