A Low Cost Outdoor Air Pollution Monitoring Device With Power Controlled Built-In PM Sensor

Abstract

Recent advances in wireless communication technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) have provided an opportunity for mass deployment of low cost sensor nodes to measure air pollution in real-time over a large geographical area. This article presents the design of a low cost, innovative Air Pollution Monitoring Device (APMD) along with the evaluation of its advanced features. An on-board Particulate Matter (PM) sensor is designed to measure PM <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2.5</sub> and PM <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">10</sub> . APMD additionally has electrochemical sensors to measure carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, besides temperature and humidity sensors. The node is equipped with a solar energy harvesting unit and a rechargeable battery as a backup to power up the module. By utilizing an on-board GPS subsystem, APMD packs all these gathered air quality data in a frame with physical location, time, and date, and sends them to a cloud server. The node can communicate through WiFi and NB-IoT connectivity. For validating the quality of sensing, the developed APMD was co-located with an accurate reference sensor node and a series of field data were collected over seven days. In a fully ON state, the on-board PM sensor saves up to 94% energy while maintaining root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.58 for PM <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2.5</sub> and 2.5 for PM <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">10</sub> . A power control mechanism is also applied on the PM sensor to control the speed of the fan by applying a pulse width modulated (PWM) signal at the switch connected to the power supply of fan. At 100 ms switching period with 30% duty cycle, the on-board PM sensor is 97% energy efficient compared to the commercial sensor, while maintaining sensing error (RMSE) as low as 0.7 for PM <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2.5</sub> and 2.7 for PM <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">10</sub> . Our outdoor deployment studies demonstrate that the designed APMD is 90.8% more power efficient than the reference setup with significantly higher coverage range, while maintaining an acceptable range of sensing error.