There are few acronyms as well known in the environmental management industry as CEMS. Also, few explain so clearly what they mean… ‘Continuous Emissions Monitoring System’. The goal of each system is very simple: stack gas measurement with guaranteed precision and uninterrupted online availability.
To achieve the continuous 100% uptime goal is a big ask and legislation around the world allows for only very short periods of outage for calibration or other maintenance activities. However, the best CEMS systems will achieve more than 97% uptime throughout the year and that, indeed, is the stretching target that environmental regulators require. For this up time to be valid, not only must the analytical instrument be functional, it must also be properly calibrated.
Calibration for CEMS instrumentation is achieved with high precision specialty gases mixtures. It is often the case that legislation will demand mixtures which are traceable to international reference materials and have suitable accreditation to back up the traceability claim. This is the domain of US EPA protocol gas mixtures and ISO17025 accredited calibration standards, some of the most sophisticated products in the world of industrial gases.
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