Design of an Air Pollution Monitoring System Based on a Low-Cost Sensor Node

Air quality influences the life of the living beings that inhabit planet Earth. High levels of air pollutants in ambient air are in fact able to affect human health and also ecosystem integrity. Their monitoring allows for regulating the most appropriate air quality indices and verifying whether they are below the established harmful levels. However, this is a task that requires many physical and economic resources. For this reason, the research activity herein presented proposes a low-cost system, which is able to qualitatively evaluate the meteorological conditions and the main pollutants that affect a certain area. Through this proposal, the behavior of Alphasense's electrochemical gas low-cost sensors is studied. Their response to the concentrations of the main air pollutants regulated by the relevant European Directive (2008/50/CE), such as Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Dioxide, Ozone, and Sulfur Dioxide, is characterized and analyzed under various environmental conditions of Temperature and Relative Humidity and as a function of the electrical current signal obtained by the chemistry of the sensor.