Design and Development of a Flexible, Plug-and-Play, Cost-Effective Tool for on-Field Evaluation of Gas Sensors

Abstract

Atmospheric pollution is one of the biggest concerns for public health. Air quality monitoring is currently performed by expensive and cumbersome monitoring stations. For this reason, they are sparse, and therefore, inadequate to provide enough accurate information on the personal exposure to pollutant gases. The current worldwide trend to address this issue consists in the use of low-cost small gas sensors, already available on the market, with a wide range of costs and performances. However, the performance of these sensors is heavily affected by the environmental conditions of the specific location used for their deployment. For this reason, it is of fundamental importance to test them in real-world scenarios. Field evaluation of sensor performance could be a challenging task because, on the one hand, they have heterogeneous output signals, and on the other hand, there is no widely shared evaluation protocol. The SentinAir system has been designed and developed to facilitate this task. It can carry out performance evaluations for any type of sensor thanks to its configurable and adaptable sensing capability, multiple wireless sensor network compatibility, flexibility, and usability. In order to evaluate SentinAir capabilities and functionalities, the performances of CO2, NO2, and O3 sensors were tested in real-world scenarios against reference instruments. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous study providing information about the performance of SP-61 (O3 sensor), IRC-A1 (CO2 sensor), and TDS5008 (CO2 sensor) achieved during on-field tests. On the contrary, results obtained by OXB431 (O3 sensor) and NO2B43F (NO2 sensor) are consistent with the ones shown in previous studies carried out in similar conditions. During validation tests, we have found R2=0.507 for the best performing NO2 sensor, and R2=0.668 for the best O3 sensor. Concerning the indoor experiment, the best CO2 sensor performance showed an excellent R2=0.995. In conclusion, the effectiveness of this tool in evaluating the performance of heterogeneous gas sensors in different real-world scenarios has been demonstrated. Therefore, we anticipate that the use of SentinAir will facilitate researchers to carry out these challenging tasks.