Constructing a Sensor Package for Air Pollution Measurement

Abstract

In recent decades, with the industrial development, it has brought many environmental problems. One of the most concerned by society is the air pollution problem which becomes more and more serious all over the world, as well as Macau, such as PM2.5. As more and more people focus on air pollution, the demand for the instrument for monitoring air quality becomes larger and larger, not only for the more sophisticated and expensive instruments but also the low-cost sensors. In this paper, the Raspberry Pi was chosen to build low-cost sensor packages. Raspberry Pi is a cheap, flexible, fully customizable and programmable small computer board. It also has many input and output ways, so that it is a suitable choice. The way of using Raspberry Pi as a low-cost sensor and the data obtained by Raspberry Pi sensors with the analysis will be shown in this paper. After that, the data which got from Raspberry Pi will be compared with the data from instruments from routine measurements. Through compared the data between the Raspberry Pi sensor packages and the Dusttrak, the correlation between them is very high whether in the indoor condition of ambient condition, and the correction formulas are also very accurate. The influences of temperature and relative humidity have been proved, although the impact of them was not very large. Correction formulas were also developed for the two sensor packages in different conditions. Therefore, low-cost sensor packages are promising in giving satisfactory performance in air pollution monitoring, and is also cost-effective.