Optimum Optical Length of the Gas Cell Used for Monitoring Gas-In-Oil with FTIR

Dedicated experiments are designed to collect the infrared spectra of dissolved gas-in-oil of power transformers. Spectra of diagnostic gases are collected by 3 different laboratorial FTIR spectrometers using 3 different gas cells with various sets of equipment parameters. A formula is deduced to calculate the shortest optical length to detect a specific concentration according to measurements on gases with known concentrations near to the minimum detection limit. Collected spectra and calculated results suggested that the optimum optical length of the gas cell should be 150 mm to realize on-line monitoring of diagnostic gases within the required concentration range. At the end, an economic novel design of the gas cell is proposed based on the optimum length.