The efforts for reducing carbon emissions by switching from coal to natural gas have created a bigger threat to global warming through natural gas leaks. Apart from the monetary losses, leakage of natural gas releases methane, which can trap more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. Most often, the leaks are left unmonitored due to the huge cost and clumsy nature of existing leak detection techniques. Hence, this thesis presents the development of a low cost and efficient technique to

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... imultaneously detect and quantify the major hydrocarbons in natural gas and thereby determine the gas composition. The instrument is based on the principle of incoherent broadband cavity enhanced absorption spectroscopy in the near infrared region (1100 to 1250 nm). The performance and detection sensitivities of the prototype were tested, and results showed detection limits much less than 1% of the lower explosion limits (LEL) of the gases.