TKH Security Solutions presents innovative Automatic Flare Stack Monitoring

The latest innovation in automatic flare stack monitoring by TKH Security Solutions was headlined at this year’s ATCE, with a presentation and a live demonstration of the system. TKH provides end-to-end solutions within the marine, oil and gas industries.

A scientific panel selected the TKH white paper on Automatic Flare Stack Monitoring for presentation at the 2017 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, on 11 October 2017.

TKH’s automatic flare detection and monitoring system with LWIR sensor technology is computer vision-based, plug-and-play and designed as a built-in part of the camera. The system is the world’s first automatic flare stack monitoring system with flare size tracking and automatic event signaling.

The model has been optimized to perform on an embedded platform.

The reliability of our proposed algorithms has been extensively tested for live flare stack monitoring in the Port of Rotterdam Botlek area, the Netherlands. Preliminary results have shown a reliable system free of false alarms.

A permanent setup for year-round testing is required to complete more comprehensive reliability tests.

In several cases, it may be beneficial to add a visible light camera, e.g. to detect black smoke. Depending on the presence of such black smoke, a dual camera setup could assist in regulating the amount of steam fed to the flare stack to increase combustion efficiency. The development of algorithms taking of dual cameras input is being considered. For applications such as black smoke detection, machine-learning techniques may also become available to learn which features from which camera are important.
 
With different zone shapes, the developed framework can also be utilized for other applications such as hotspot, fire or machine overheat detection. A dual camera setup could for example serve as an automatic forest fire detection system.