The new device will measure the quality of the external environment

News, 22/03/2021

The University Centre for Energy Efficient Buildings of CTU is working on the development of a new sensor platform for measuring quality parameters of the outdoor environment.

After introducing the sensors for measuring the quality of the indoor environment IAQ_03/IAQ_04, scientists from the research department Monitoring and Control of Intelligent Buildings of the Czech Technical University UCEEB are also actively dealing with the possibilities of measuring the quality parameters of the outdoor environment. At the same time, they had to deal with the fact that pollution of the urban environment from traffic, industry or construction activities requires the measurement of different parameters than for indoor sensors.

While the biggest problem in the interior is the increased concentration of CO2, in the exterior in the urban environment there are often critical concentrations of gases produced in the combustion engines of vehicles (nitrogen oxides). Solid particle pollution is also a problem in the vicinity of highways or busy intersections.

The prototype of the newly proposed outdoor sensor platform supports the measurement of air temperature and humidity, the amount of dust particles from very fine to coarse (from PM 1 to PM 10), UV index, noise and concentration of nitrogen oxides, ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and carbonaceous.

The requirements for communication technologies for data transmission from measurements in the outdoor environment are also different. While wireless WiFi is the most available communication technology for indoor measurements, outdoors it is advantageous to use IoT LPWAN networks with national coverage. Therefore, the proposed platform will support both the LoRaWAN network and the new NB-IoT network. Testing takes place in the networks of Slovak Telekom and Vodafone operators.