Air quality monitoring in a near-city industrial zone by low-cost sensor technologies: A case study

Urban industrial areas are often a matter of concern due to the emissions of air pollutants that may affect the air quality of the adjacent cities. The aerosol pollutants are monitored by governmental agencies that employ regulatory monitoring stations which are very accurate, but also very expensive, bulky, and maintenance demanding. For this reason, it often happens that the monitoring of the air quality in large areas are covered by few stations. This situation can lead to the building of air pollutant maps having a low spatio-temporal resolution. An appealing way to address this issue is represented by the Low-Cost miniaturized gas Sensors (LCS) employed in the Low-Cost air quality Monitors (LCM). Despite the various and unquestionable points of strength characterizing these devices, the scientific community has raised several warnings about the accuracy of their measurements and many caveats in their use. In this study, a new LCM model designed and implemented in our laboratories has been used to perform the measurements of the NO₂ and PM concentrations in the industrial area of Brindisi (Italy). The LCSs installed in the LCM used for this experiment are the NO2B43F for NO₂ measurements, and the SPS30 for particulate matter (PM) detection. Data gathered by the LCM have been compared with reference instrumentations for a rigorous analysis of the performance achievable through these low-cost technologies in this particular case.