Abstract
Air pollution in urban areas is a huge concern that demands an efficient air quality control to ensure health quality standards. The hotspots can be located by increasing spatial distribution of ambient air quality monitoring for which the low-cost sensors can be used. However, it is well-known that many factors influence their results. For low-cost Particulate Matter (PM) sensors, high relative humidity can have a significant impact on data quality. In order to eliminate or reduce the impact of high relative humidity on the results obtained from low-cost PM sensors, a low-cost dryer was developed and its effectiveness was investigated. For this purpose, a test chamber was designed, and low-cost PM sensors as well as professional reference devices were installed. A vaporizer regulated the humid conditions in the test chamber. The low-cost dryer heated the sample air with a manually adjustable intensity depending on the voltage. Different voltages were tested to find the optimum one with least energy consumption and maximum drying efficiency. The low-cost PM sensors with and without the low-cost dryer were compared. The experimental results verified that using the low-cost dryer reduced the influence of relative humidity on the low-cost PM sensor results.
Highlights
The importance of good ambient air quality has strongly increased around the world
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nine out of ten people live in places where the air quality guidelines are not fulfilled and every year poor air quality is related to 4.2 million premature deaths [1]
Municipalities and authorities install stationary air quality monitoring stations in specific locations based on a measurement strategy and criteria for setting up the monitoring stations, e.g., height of sample inlets, distance to crossings, distance to roads, number of people impacted by air pollution, etc
Summary
The impacts are related to human beings, and to the ecosystems and earth climate system [6,7] Considering these air pollution impacts, the air quality monitoring is nowadays of great concern, because it provides the necessary information to develop and implement suitable methods to improve ambient air quality. For this purpose, municipalities and authorities install stationary air quality monitoring stations in specific locations based on a measurement strategy and criteria for setting up the monitoring stations, e.g., height of sample inlets, distance to crossings, distance to roads, number of people impacted by air pollution, etc. A good spatial resolution is necessary especially in areas where the pollutant distribution is not homogeneous, because of the influence of different sources as in the case of an urban environment [10]
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