Fine Dust Measurement
Knowledge about the status of the air quality, lead to knowledge about uncomfortable or dangerous situations regarding the concentration of smoke, oxygen, loudness or other influences. To watch limits and react if neccesary is a contribution for a sustainable development of lifestyle.
Since 2016 cheap sensors are available for the measurement of the amount of particles in classes of PM10 (less than 10 µm) and PM 2.5 (less than 2.5 µm). An international network including a database was realised by a university in Germany to collect data of fine dust from all over the world. It´s an open project with the invitation to participate for everyone. Additionally, some commercial devices are available, and also devices developed at the Laboratory for Measurement and instrumentation.
Project Goals
Task 1: The hardware of a stationary fine dust measurement system is to program according to the roles of the “luftdaten.info” - acquirements. This system is to connect to a research database of the University of Stuttgart via internet. The measured data have to read out from the data base and to be displayed on a screen in real time.
Task 2: Aim of this task is the production of some videos, where we demonstrate how different sources lead to fine dust. The choice of examples are free. The videos should show the increase and decrease of the amount of fine dust. Used will be devices, developed at the Laboratory for measurement and instrumentation. This devices are able to measure in real-time and to store the data including time and GPS position as csv-File. This should be used to demonstrate the development of the fine dust concentration over the time and depending the locatioIf students are interested in programming (raspberry Pi, python, HTML……) here are also many tasks to improve the devices, e.g. connection of humidity sensor DHT22, synchronisation of screen update and sample rate, automatisation of excel import and so on…...
Task 3: Investigation of differences of measurement results of different kinds of measurement devices for PM10 and PM2.5. A special in particle size measurements is, that different measurement principles measure different equivalent diameter. This leads to different results. For this investigation, we have 4 different kinds of measurement devices and from each kind we have two devices (in total 8 devices). The task is to compare the accuracy of the same devices, as well as the differences of different devices.
Study Areas
In this project, we would like to serve two fields: Students with a computer science, electrical engineering or similar background, we would like to make a further development of our devices for fine dust measurement. Knowledge and experience in RaspberryPi programming (python, html, java script) would be perfect.
Students from environmental science, we would like to measure concentrations of fine dust in and around Östersund, detect sources and produce a map with the fine dust concentrations. The concentrations should be compared with the European standards.
Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering/Computer Science
The students contribute to the project in following fields:
- raspberry Pi programming,
- connection of additional sensors
- field studies in fine dust measurements
Environmental Science
The students contribute to the project in following fields:
- Field studies in fine dust measurements, find sources
- produce examples, e.g. from cars, heating plants and so on
- Displaying the fine dust situation location and time depending
- produce a demo movie
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Joerg Hoffmann, University of Applied Sciences of Osnabrueck
Email: j.hoffmann@hs-osnabrueck.