System Design for Early Detection of Explosive and Flammable Gas Leaks Using Mobile Robot in Confined Space

Abstract The presence of explosive or flammable gases in confined space may contribute towards accidents that threaten the workers safety and industrial progress. Conventionally, the existing instrument for gas detection in confined space is manually carried by humans whereby the workers or competence person itself were exposed directly to the gases. This project is aim to develop a prototype system to detect the presence of gases leak where the robotic system replaces humans to carry gas sensors. Users only need to maneuver the robot using a mobile phone to monitor the specific area that may have an explosive or flammable gas leak which includes Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and methane gases. The sensors will detect if a change in the gas concentration has exceeded a safety limit and will activate the alarm as an alert signal. The readings of gases as input signals were sent wirelessly to the Personal Computer (PC) as a user device for monitoring purposes. This prototype is successfully developed, tested and calibrated using the samples of LPG gas, methane, smoke and environment temperature. The result proved that the developed system is able to detect an air sample using selected gas sensors and display the data in graph form with live monitoring. This will contribute significantly to acquiring a new and alternative method using the system for detecting the presence of gases in confined space application.