Enhancing optical quantification of combustion products using thermochemical manifold reduction

Abstract

Obtaining the composition and concentration distribution of combustion products from spectroscopic data often amounts to solving an ill-posed problem, which impairs the accuracy of recovered parameters. This study evaluates the feasibility of using a thermochemical manifold reduction (TCMR) mechanism to reduce the number of unknown parameters, thereby decreasing the ill-posedness of the problem. The approach is demonstrated by recovering carbon dioxide and methane column densities within a flare plume using hyperspectral images. The results show marked improvement in retrieval accuracy for hyperspectral images in the case of carbon dioxide, but not for methane.