Development of a reliable measurement station for air quality monitoring based on low-cost sensors and active redundancy

Abstract

Air pollution is often monitored by conventional measuring stations which require heavy investments and qualified personnel. They allow reliable, accurate, and continuous monitoring of the evolution of air pollution. However, few stations are deployed and territories of several thousand of km2 are coarsely covered. Consequently, it is difficult to observe local pollution phenomena. To try to solve this problem, low-cost sensor networks (LCS) are used. Inexpensive and easy to deploy, they allow finer spatial measurements and detection of local pollution sources. However, LCS present several drawbacks, notably in terms of component quality, measurement reliability, and their relative lifetime. As a result, achieving air quality monitoring objectives reliably and continuously becomes difficult. To overcome these drawbacks, a measuring station based on LCS and active redundancy is developed in this paper. Its main feature lies on the redundancy of smart sensors composed of LCS, which allows monitoring pollutant concentrations at a specific spatial point reliably and continuously. This measuring station is deployed in the city of Argelès-Gazost to monitor the background pollution and track its evolution throughout the year. It transmits its data to a central server which offers a friendly graphical representation and stores the data and use them for later processing and decisions.