IIT-Bombay Invents Cancer-Causing Soot Measuring Technique To Reduce Air Pollution

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay have created a new data-processing technique that measures minute amounts of soot with stellar accuracy, which would help in the development of better combustion-based engines in future.

AFP

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Reported first by Hindustan Times, in case you were wondering what soot really is, it¡¯s essentially the tiny black particles that are seen to rise from a flame. Soot gets formed when the fuel isn¡¯t burning up completely. During a clean fuel-burning process, you get to see a blue flame, whereas if there¡¯s soot formation, the flame turns yellow and hot.

Soot is notorious for causing cancer, cardiac and respiratory disorders while also reducing the lifetime of machine parts. So measuring soot to nip its formation in the bud is essential.

Accurately measuring minute levels of soot has been challenging to execute, however, IIT Bombay researchers have come up with a new way to reduce the measurement errors.

For this, researchers first conducted analysis on digital camera images of burning fuel to guess the temperature of the fuel and use the information to estimate soot volume. They passed a beam of red laser light of a specific frequency through a droplet of burning fuel and captured pictures as it burnt.

While capturing the flame, the light from the flame was also falling on the camera, apart from the laser. To filter this, they made use of a narrow-band filter to only allow the passing of the laser light. When a flame with soot particles passes through light, the phenomenon is called background light.

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The researchers used the relation between the initial brightness of laser light, the brightness of the light falling on the camera and the soot volume to calculate the amount of soot. Then they used data processing techniques to denote the values of brightness in their images.

Anand Sankaranarayanan, a post-doctoral researcher from IIT-Bombay and co-author of the study said, ¡°Using our new data processing technique, we got lower errors, especially when the amount of soot produced is low. Our technique does not require any additional equipment or extra expenditure, which is an added advantage.¡±

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BCCL

To bring errors further down, they passed the laser beam through a fixed and rotating diffuser, which is essentially a glass sheet that scatters light, before the light was incident on the burning fuel. The diffuser allows for evenly bright light and avoids many speckles in the image.

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Comparing this with previous measurements and analysis, and verified the results while also qualitatively checking their experimental observations.

Sankaranarayanan added, ¡°We observed a similar peak value of the amount of soot. As expected, we saw high amounts of soot slightly inside the outer edges of the flame, where temperatures and fuel concentration are high.¡±

For more cool science and technology news, keep visiting Indiatimes.com, and let us know if this IIT-Bombay soot measurement technique will ultimately help us reduce air pollution.