Development of innovative indoor/outdoor air quality monitoring for environmental impact assessment in the State of Qatar

Abstract

Air pollution is one of the most crucial factors affecting the quality of life and health of increasingly urban populations; a country with a fast-growing economy based on hydrocarbons such as Qatar is no exception. In addition to the adverse impact of air pollution on humans, animals and plants, the presence of dust and air-borne particulate matter affect negatively the efficiency of solar panels used for power generation. In this project, a comprehensive wireless solution is proposed for monitoring and measuring the levels of some known harmful gases such as CO2, NO2 and CH4 as well as other environmental parameters such as dust, temperature, humidity, solar irradiance, pressure, wind-direction and wind speed. Data is collected by appropriate sensor nodes (NI-WSN) that communicate wirelessly (using IEEE 802.15.4 protocol) with a host computer (Gateway) that receives, processes, stores and displays the collected information via LabVIEW environment, which represents the software part of the project (Programming and GUI Design). The data processing part includes analysing the environmental parameter levels, which is later used to study the efficiency of using solar panels in Qatar. The complete system has been implemented and successfully tested in a chosen site within Qatar University Campus. In the long term, we hope that the data collected from our air quality monitoring system will help in areas of research related to environmental monitoring and developing systems that correlate indoor and outdoor readings to the operation of an indoor HVAC system.