EVALUATION OF ALPHASENSE OPC-N2 SENSOR FOR PM10 MEASUREMENT IN THE NORTH JAKARTA

Abstract

Spatial and temporal data of particulate matter (PM) are limited in Indonesia; hence cost-effective and robust instruments to monitor PM concentration could complete data coverage. The low-cost sensor (LCS) Alphasense OPC-N2 provides real-time PM concentration data and is relatively simple to install and deploy. This paper presents data from an OPC-N2 sensor collocated with a PM10 Beta Attenuation Monitor (BAM). The study was carried out at an air quality monitoring site in North Jakarta belonging to the provincial government. The location is considered suitable for evaluating the performance of OPC-N2 micro sensor as it is a representative of a typical Indonesian urbanized area with a range of pollutant sources, including sea-sourced aerosols. At the same site, a filter-based Gent Sampler (GS) measuring both PM10 and PM2.5 was also deployed. The study showed that 30-minutely and daily average concentrations data for PM10 measured by OPC-N2 were lower than that of BAM measurements in both averaged durations by approximately 50%. The comparison between OPC-N2 and GS for PM10 showed that OPC-N2 measurement was underestimated but it was overestimated for PM2.5. Nonetheless, correlations of OPC-N2 and BAM were 0.530 and 0.607 for PM10 and PM2.5, respectively. These results were comparable to other low-cost sensor evaluation studies in different countries, suggesting that the sensor can represent temporal variation of the reference measurement.