New Infrared Methane Sensor

City Technology (UK) is pleased to announce the expansion of its range of IRceL® infrared sensors with the addition of a methane sensor – IRceL® CH4.

Infrared sensors are being increasingly used in place of pellistors for detecting flammable gases in both fixed and portable gas detectors. Although infrared sensors are not directly analogous to pellistors (they don’t measure combustion and will not detect H2 for instance) they have the benefits of longlife, not being susceptible to poisoning, operating in anaerobic conditions and they fail “safe”. Consequently infrared based sensors for detecting a range of hydrocarbons are being increasingly used in certain applications.

City Technology’s new methane sensor, IRceL® CH4, is in the industry standard 4 Series format and is fully certified to flameproof and intrinsically safe standards.

The IRceL® CH4 has been designed to deliver the best possible performance and uses high quality optical components comprising a longlife tungsten filament bulb as the IR source and a dual channel pyroelectric detector (reference and detector). The novel non focusing optical design, offers significant improvements in performance over other optical designs enabling the sensor to operate reliably and reproducibly across a wide temperature range.

Like all the IRceL® range, the methane sensor contains an embedded EEPROM that contains device specific calibration factors which, when used together with City Technology’s algorithms for signal linearization and temperature compensation, allow the instrument to perform with industry leading accuracy virtually unaffected by temperature.

As the temperature behaviour of each sensor is fully characterized during manufacture the user does not have to perform this timeconsuming task so reducing the cost and time of instrument assembly.