Braeburn Energy’s CalorieSense™ Transforms How We Measure Fuel Quality

Precision Meets Intelligence

Braeburn Energy • Oct 07, 2025

As the energy sector shifts towards hydrogen, biomethane and synthetic blends, the need for accurate, real-time fuel quality measurement has never been greater. Whether calibrating combustion systemsor ensuring regulatory compliance, one metric remains central: calorific value, which is the amount of usable energy a fuel delivers.

For conventional fuels like natural gas, calorific value is well characterised. But alternative fuels introduce variability, uncertainty and complexity. This demands a new generation of measurement tools, which are fast, adaptive and scalable.

Established Techniques: Useful, But Limited

Historically, calorimetry has relied on a handful of well-established techniques. Each has its strengths, but also limitations when applied to modern, dynamic fuel streams.

Bomb calorimetry involves combusting a fuel sample in a sealed chamber surrounded by water. The temperature rise in the water is used to determine the total energy released. While highly accurate for solids and liquids, it’s unsuitable for real-time or in-situ gas measurements.

Gas chromatography (GC) separates and identifies individual gas components by passing them through a column. Each gas specie travels at a different speed through the column, allowing detailed composition analysis. It is excellent for species identification but requires expensive laboratory infrastructure, skilled operators and calibration standards. Furthermore, chromatography is a slow technique that often requiresbetween 15-90 minutes of analytical time depending on gas composition.

Thermal conductivity detection (TCD) measures the amount of heat agas specie conductswhen passed over a heated filament. It is compact and relatively fast, but limited in specificity and sensitive to ambient conditions.

Infrared (IR) spectroscopy detects gas molecules based on their absorption of infrared light. Each species has a unique absorption wavelength. IR is non-invasive and suitable for continuous monitoring, but less effective with complex or unknown mixtures.

The above techniques can be precise, but with limited real-time measurement capability. They often assume stable fuel profiles and controlled environments, which do not meet the needs for modern fuel-flexible systems.

Braeburn Energy’s CalorieSense™: A New Standard in Fuel Measurement

Braeburn Energy is leading a new paradigm in calorimetry, one that is adaptive, intelligent and built for modern energy systems.

Our CalorieSense™ platform combines multiple sensor inputs into a unified calorimetric model. It does notjust measure, it learns. It adapts to rapidly-changing fuel compositions, flags anomalies and evolves with application-specific operational needs.

At the heart of this innovation is Braeburn’s proprietary sensor fusion technology, BE Sense, which enables multi-modal, real-time sensor integration for robust inference. Edge intelligence interprets sensor data dynamically, adjusting to environmental and compositional shifts. The modular architecture supports deployment across a wide range of engineering domains, including gas turbines/thermal plants, flare stack control, steel mills, fuel production and reprocessing, waste treatment and other industrial applications.

Each measurement is calibrated, auditable, and traceable for reliable performance. In a world of evolving fuels, CalorieSense™ transforms calorimetry from a static procedure into a dynamic, intelligent process.

It is more than energy measurement,it is about confident decision-making.