Abstract:
Air pollution is directly related to both the cause and aggravation of various diseases and the cause of ecological damage to the environment. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 4.2 million deaths are attributed to air pollution each year and 91 % of the World's population lives in places that exceed the indicated air quality limits. In this work, an intelligent and compact wireless sensor for air pollution monitoring is presented having as main target to alert the population and to allow certain control of pollutants emissions by governing authorities. The proposed wireless intelligent sensor monitors Particulate Matter (PM) using the cheap and compact PPD42NS sensor, which uses light scattering to measure particles concentration. To consider the PPD42NS sensor as the PM sensor to the proposed wireless sensor, a calibration process was conducted using as the reference equipment the HiVol HVS 3000, fabricated by the Ecotech and approved by the EPA as a Federal Reference Method. After the calibration process, the PPD42NS shows to be very effective to measure PM concentration in real time allowing the proposer wireless sensor to compute the Air Quality Index (AQI) in the area it is deployed. Another result takes the PPD42NS power consumption in consideration and points out a possible approach to reduce it, namely, eliminating its electronic circuit. The conclusion is that just 5% of power consumption is achieved with this solution since the most responsible for the consumption is the heater resistor.
Keywords:
Air quality, Particulate matter, PPD42NS sensor, HiVol HVS 3000.
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