An experimental setup with ultrasonic gas analyzers and real time analysis of the composition of a binary gas mixture

Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Physics, Technická 4, 16607, Prague 6, Czech Republic

Abstract

This paper describes an automated measuring apparatus with an ultrasonic gas analyzer and realtime analysis of the composition of the gas. The apparatus is designed for preparing binary gas mixtures and making measurements in a wide range of pressures (from 0.8 bar_a to 15 bar_a) and temperatures (between -15°C and 80°C). The apparatus was developed to determine the thermophysical properties of fluorocarbon mixtures for potential use in the cooling circuits of several Large Hadron Collider projects at CERN. The design of its control system took into account the safety and reliability o the gas analyzer, and the need to limit the presence of laboratory personnel. The control system was implemented in PVSS-II, the Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition standard chosen for LHC and its experiments at CERN. The second part of the paper describes the implementation and verification of the algorithm for continuous real-time determination of the composition of the refrigerant mixture. The algorithm is based on minimizing the quadratic norm fromthe measured data and from the pre-generated look-up tables acquired from the NIST REFPROP software package.