High performance Ash Fusion temperature measurement

Ash Fusion temperature measurement of a gasifier in a CTL plant is necessary to determine the extent of ash clinkering inside the gasifier, and ultimately to avoid unstable gasifier operation and pressure drop related problems. A suitable smart instrumentation measurement system with a minimum bandwidth of 1 kHz is proposed, which comprises of an R type thin film thermocouple sensor for temperature detection with the aid of an Resistance-to-Temperature Device, a capacitive pressure sensor for interference detection, amplifiers and filters for signal conditioning, a microcontroller for data processing and a USB device for data logging. Analysis of static and dynamic characteristics of the system limits aliasing error to 1% and determines the system error as 1.75% and the system bandwidth as 1MHz.