Benefits of Using Portable and Specific Gas Analyzers
All through the year, thousands of cargo with unknown gas concentrations come into the ports from all over the world. Some of these gases, including fumigants, insecticides, or manufacturing gases, are dangerous for people to handle, posing an immediate safety concern. Therefore, it is crucial that we provide accurate and complete measuring procedures for container gases. However, due to a lack of equipment that is user-friendly and provides immediate and reliable results, checking and analysing gas measurements can be a time-consuming and expensive operation. This is when you will need the portable handheld analyzers.
Challenges for Current Technologies and Gas Analyzers
The recipe for safe and economical container measurements has three components:
- Gas analyzers must be able to determine whether or not the concentrations of gases in containers are harmful because they virtually always contain concentrations of gases that are different from pure air.
- Because there may be a huge variety of gases in the containers, gas analyzers must be able to distinguish between a wide range of gases.
- To ensure accuracy, the amount of time containers are left at ports while waiting to be vented or measured must be kept to a minimum.
For the current technologies and gas analyzers, these three factors pose significant difficulties. The gases that are present are almost impossible to foresee and can only be discovered through meticulous component analysis. As a result, there is a significant risk to the health and safety of workers if they are exposed to dangerous gases before thoroughly analysing the gas consistencies.
What is Required of Efficient Gas Analyzers?
- Specificity: Ability to differentiate between different compounds
- Multicomponent capability: able to measure many chemicals at once
- Portability: able to produce immediate, on-the-spot, and internet findings.
In the end, we can drastically reduce expenses and ensure the health and safety of the workers handling shipping containers and the items inside of them by enhancing the efficiency of gas analyzers and providing more accurate results.
Specificity
Non-specific technology, like PIDs (photoionization detectors), react to a sizable variety of various gases, but they don’t provide anything about the real makeup of the gas sample. These measures cannot reveal whether the gas is hazardous like benzene or innocuous like methane; they can only show that there is something other than pure air in the container. Avoiding erroneous alerts and time-consuming ventilations is made possible by mapping out the concentrations of hazardous and non-hazardous gases. In the transportation industry, time is money, and ventilations add needless delays.
Multicomponent capacity
It is not practical to measure each component independently due to the wide range of gases that can exist in a container. It is challenging to determine which components should be measured without prior information of what is in the sample. As a result, the measurer would need to utilise a lot of tools or test tubes to be able to say with any certainty that the atmosphere is actually safe. This would take far too long and be excessively expensive. Gas analyzers must therefore be able to identify several gases at once. This increases the assessment’s efficacy and timeliness and lowers personnel risk.
Portability
Last but not least, it is crucial that measurements be completed quickly and without any interruptions to the analysis procedure. Most of the time, there isn’t enough time to wait for test results or to transport the samples. Additionally, there is a chance that samples will be insufficient or will become unstable while being delivered to the lab, increasing the likelihood of unreliability. More precise and speedy findings can be ensured by minimising the amount of equipment and bringing an easily transportable device to the shipping containers. Additionally, portable gadgets can provide immediate internet results.
It can be difficult for industrial hygienists and other people in charge of firefighting and emergency response to determine which portable devices will be most helpful given the wide variety of instruments used to assess airborne levels of dangerous gases and vapours. Getting accurate assessments of air risks is crucial whether you’re in charge of hazmat response, post-fire cleanup tasks, or deciding whether you require respiratory protection.
Here are the top available technologies for portable gas analysers –
Photoionization Detectors
Due to their short response times and capacity to identify the majority of volatile organic compounds down to the low parts-per-billion level, photoionization detector (PID) devices are widely used. How exact a device needs to be in order to measure and identify a given gas is a key factor for users. When employing PID devices, specificity can be an issue since, although PID values are cumulative to a reference gas, they actually comprise of a wide range of gases at different concentrations. When measurements are meant to be scaled to particular compounds, correction factors must be included because a PID might not detect some gases including carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, methane, and acid gases. After every successful exposure, PID lamps should be cleaned to avoid signal suppression.
Portable Gas Monitors
Portable multi-gas monitors featuring sensors for combustible gas, oxygen, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen sulphide are common among emergency personnel. These devices often include built-in alerts for worker safety and confined space monitoring. Without being compound-specific, the combustible gas or lower explosive limit (LEL) sensor gives important information. Electrochemical sensors are specifically used to measure oxygen, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen sulphide. Numerous businesses also provide single-gas portable monitors that can make use of a range of electrochemical sensors designed for other relevant poisonous or hazardous gases.
Portable gas monitors offer simple but essential information about potentially dangerous atmospheres while being reasonably priced and simple to use. Due to the consumable nature of the electrolytic design, there are only a few different types of electrochemical sensors, and they have a limited lifespan. The existence of concomitant gases and other factors that may affect sensor output must be understood by users of portable gas monitors.
Detector Tubes
Another choice for gas detection is stain tubes, which are gas detector tubes. For quick and compound-specific qualitative evaluations, gas detector tubes use chemical reactions that produce a colour change indicating length of stain. Currently, logic charts that guide users through the sequence of tubes to utilise while attempting to identify unknown atmospheric threats are included with detector tube hazmat kits that are available for purchase. With detector tubes, remote sampling is possible with the aid of extension hoses or pole accessories. Similar to electrochemical sensors, some gases can obstruct detector tube tests, but hundreds of compounds, including pollutants that other systems may miss, can be analysed with detector tubes.