Monitoring SF₆ Gas Leakage Based on a Customized Binocular System

Sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆) gas is extensively utilized as an insulating and arc-quenching medium in the circuit breakers and isolating switches of electrical equipment. It effectively isolates the circuits from the atmosphere and promptly extinguishes arcs. Therefore, the issue of SF₆ gas leakage poses a significant threat to the related application fields, and the detection of SF₆ gas leakage becomes extremely important. Infrared imaging detection offers advantages including non-contact, high precision, and visualization. However, most existing infrared detection systems are equipped with only one filter to detect SF₆ gas. The images captured contain background noise and system noise, making these systems vulnerable to interference from such noises. To address these issues, we propose a method for monitoring SF₆ gas leakage based on a customized binocular imaging (CBI) system. The CBI system has two filters, greatly reducing the interference of system noise and background noise. The first filter features the absorption resonant peak of SF₆ gas. The second filter is used to record background noise and system noise. One aspect to note is that, in order to avoid the interference of other gases, the central wavelength of this second filter should keep away from the absorption resonant peaks of those gases. Accordingly, the central wavelengths of our customized filters were determined as 10,630 nm and 8370 nm, respectively. Then, two cameras of the same type were separately assembled with a customized filter, and the CBI prototype was accomplished. Finally, we utilized the difference method using two infrared images captured by the CBI system, to monitor the SF₆ gas leakage. The results demonstrate that our developed system achieves a high accuracy of over 99.8% in detecting SF₆ gas. Furthermore, the CBI system supports a plug-and-play customization to detect various gases for different scenarios.