Lidar utilisation for industrial stack plume automatic tracking

The use of a lidar system for the automatic control of industrial emission of particulates is analysed. The problems involved in tracking a stack plume include the detection of the plume centre and propagation direction, as well as the management of the information already available in order to advance the track automatically. A computer simulation has been realized in order to refine and test a tracking algorithm, and some results are included here. A strong dependence of the tracking performances on the lidar placement has been pointed out by the simulation results.