Infrared Image Processing for Operating Point Control of Gas Turbine Combustor

The paper presents a technique to estimate the combustor equivalence ratio based on broadband infrared flame images. A static zonal interrogation technique was developed to separate flame images from the combustor background. Histogram characteristics of gray scale images were used to correlate the image properties with flame equivalence ratios. Two histogram properties i.e. average number of pixels at 100 to 200 intensity-class and number of pixels at 150 intensity-classes were used to develop the correlation.