Abstract
The health problems caused by exposure to airborne Particulate Matter (PM) beyond safe limits have been studied for many years. Government regulatory agencies have adapted and updated the safe exposure limits as more progress is made both in policy developments and detection system design. Bulky PM detectors, though very accurate do not provide sufficient spatial and temporal resolution, and are static and expensive. Current much smaller commercial PM sensors are mobile but still mostly too expensive and largely still too big for real-time continuous personal use. They also must be calibrated to convert their counts to mass concentration despite their variation from unit to unit. The continuous drive towards having a cheaper, smaller, yet more effective PM sensors for personal exposure analysis and indoor environments is pushing the current boundaries of current techniques. Emerging PM sensing techniques must now achieve this, while also linking to other structured source apportionment and semantic analysis of air quality data aimed at providing useful information about user activities mostly provided via the internet. This review highlights research on PM detection and monitoring, covering methods and principle of operation of detection instruments, emerging trends and future outlooks. Further, this work reviews PM detection challenges, measurement interpretation and possible solutions going forward.
Highlights
Air quality below set standard limits have been linked to a number of conditions including asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), pneumonia, and breast cancer [1,2,3,4,5]
It has been established that air pollution is heterogeneous in space so localized monitoring techniques are generally unable to capture this information though some research work is ongoing to use satellite Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) data [24], [28]–[32]
Personal exposure studies carried out using portable Particulate Matter (PM) monitors such as those based on light scattering [33] and condensation particle counting techniques [34] are able to reveal both space and time variations, they are still relatively expensive to purchase
Summary
Air quality below set standard limits have been linked to a number of conditions including asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), pneumonia, and breast cancer [1,2,3,4,5]. It has been established that air pollution is heterogeneous in space so localized monitoring techniques are generally unable to capture this information though some research work is ongoing to use satellite Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) data [24], [28]–[32]. Personal exposure studies carried out using portable PM monitors such as those based on light scattering [33] and condensation particle counting techniques [34] are able to reveal both space and time variations, they are still relatively expensive to purchase.
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