Impact analysis of multi-sensor layout on the source term estimation of hazardous gas leakage

In chemical industry, sensors are used to monitor the leakage and emission of hazardous materials that are used for hazard warning and risk assessment to ensure safety production. The traditional sensor layout designs the scheme at single-layer, and thus causes large deviations in the estimated height and accuracy of source term estimation (STE). In this study, a dual-layer layout scheme for sensors is proposed. The numerical experiments verify that the improved schemes with an equal number of sensors, as well as detection errors, are beneficial to the accuracy of the STE results. The influence of the heights of the sensors and leak source on the results of STE is studied. Results show that the dual-layer sensor scheme with adjacent intervals at high places in the potential search space is highly favorable to locate the leak, and the scheme arranged near the ground is conducive for improving the estimation accuracy of source intensity. This study also compares the STE results of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulated scenarios under different sensor schemes and verifies the effectiveness of the proposed dual-layer sensor deployment scheme with adjacent intervals under turbulence condition. •A two-layer sensor layout scheme with an equal number of sensors is proposed for source term estimation.•Uncertain factors such as turbulence and sensor detection errors are taken into account.•Influence of the sensor placement heights on the accuracy of source term estimation is studied.•The influence of sensor layouts and leak heights on source term estimation are studied.