Development of Optoelectronic Instrumentation for Resource Efficiency in the Foundation Industries

Foundation industries such as iron, glass, and petrochemical manufacturing are
significant contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, releasing millions of
tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. Despite their major impact on
the environment, these products will be needed in construction projects across the
world for the foreseeable future, therefore developing more efficient manufacturing
plants is critical to minimising their carbon footprint.
Some decarbonisation improvements are already being made, such as the shift
to burning hydrogen instead of natural gas for heating processes, but this is not
yet widely understood and will take decades to be fully adopted at scale. Given
the long timeline for hydrogen to fully replace natural gas heating, it is worthwhile
improving the efficiency of current manufacturing plants to reduce their impact on
the environment in the short and medium-term.
Parameters such as real-time temperature, shape, and chemical composition
are critical to efficient operation and have been the subject of numerous theoretical
modelling studies, but at present there is a lack of real-world data available to develop
or verify them experimentally.
The bottleneck caused by the lack of real-time monitoring systems severely limits
any potential progress and risks further delays to global decarbonisation efforts in the
foundation industries. Consequently, there is a need to develop new measurement
equipment to better inform researchers and operators how and where efficiency
improvements can be made, as well as increasing operator safety by removing
dangerous manual testing methods.
This thesis documents the development of two novel instruments that provide
quantitative measurements of distance, temperature, and gas spectra to address this
lack of test and measurement equipment.