Application of a Diode-Laser-Based Ultraviolet Absorption Sensor for <i>in Situ</i> Measurements of Atomic Mercury in Coal-Combustion Exhaust
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A diode-laser-based ultraviolet absorption sensor was successfully demonstrated for both in situ and extractive sampling atomic mercury measurements in a laboratory-scale 29.3 kW t (100 000 BTU/h) coal combustor and in situ measurements in a flow reactor at Texas A&M University. Laser sensor measurements were compared to measurements from a commercial mercury analyzer (CMA). A 375 nm single-mode laser and a 784 nm distributed feedback (DFB) laser are sum-frequency-mixed in a nonlinear β-barium borate crystal to generate a 254 nm beam. By tuning the frequency of the DFB laser, the ultraviolet beam frequency was tuned across the transition frequency of mercury at 253.7 nm. The tuning range was large enough that an off-resonant baseline was clearly visible on both sides of the Hg transition. No pretreatment is required for elemental mercury measurements, and the effects of broadband absorption can be effectively eliminated during data analysis. Extractive sampling was demonstrated to improve the detection limit of the sensor and demonstrate the feasibility of total mercury concentration measurements in the future through extractive sampling. Significant variation in the atomic mercury concentration of coal-combustion exhaust was observed over short time periods during our in situ measurements. The sensor detection limits for in situ and extractive sampling are 0.3 and 0.1 parts per billion over a 1 m path length, respectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".