Project uses laser sensing to measure gas turbine emissions

The four-year, £2.7m FLITES (Fibre-Laser Imaging of gas Turbine Exhaust Species) project is an academic and industrial research collaboration led by Southampton University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) and Rolls-Royce.

The goal is to better understand the combustion process, especially in light of the increased useage of bio-derived fuel mixes in the aviation industry, with a view to cutting overall emissions.

There is also a need to improve methods currently used to monitor and diagnose jet engines, as ORC’s Prof Johan Nilsson explained to The Engineer.

‘At the moment the way this is measured — for things [such as] soot — is essentially you stick hoses through the jet plume, collect exhaust coming out and pass it through some sort of filter. It takes a lot of time and you don’t get a lot of data — not much has been done in terms of advancing the state of the art.’

Measurement will initially focus on soot, unburned hydrocarbons, carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide. This will require an infrared laser array with different spectral characteristics for each of the four emission species.