“The project tackles one of the most serious issues of the 21st century, the degrading quality of air around us. We use LoRa to address this.
In the recent years, air pollution has been a growing concern for the harmful effects it has on our environment. The problem is prevailing particularly in urban cities because of the increased traffic and a wide array of industries which produce a lot of harmful gases as a bi-product of manufacturing. Apart from this, indoor air pollution is also a great concern in metro cities. According to research, the air inside our house is even more polluted compared to the air in outdoor environments.
Hence, a number of countries have already taken preventive measures and setup various air and weather quality monitoring systems in the popular destinations of their big cities so that they can obtain the data and take the necessary steps to prevent the adverse effects of air pollution. But there are several problems with the present systems. Firstly, these systems use the primitive methods which includes collecting air samples and get them tested in a laboratory and even though this methodology is reliable, it is highly ineffective and very expensive (the laboratory equipment). Secondly, there is no system yet created to address the issue of indoor air pollution which has a harmful effect on the health of a great number of individuals every year. So, it is of utmost importance to develop an advanced system which can overcome the above drawbacks.
This project presents a real-time and long-range air pollution monitoring system for indoor and outdoor environments. The system implemented a wireless sensor network using LoraWAN technology for data communication between all nodes and sensors. The system consists of two nodes distributed within 1 Km distance to gateway for measuring the concentration of VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), carbon dioxide andPM2.5 (Particulate Matter 2.5um) readings. Experimental results show the system is reliable in both indoor and outdoor applications. The distance coverage achieved up to 900m and can be displayed through a web-based client (Thingspeak) and also from an Android or iOS application. The experiment with LoraWAN transmission has shown that the LoraWAN technology is very suitable for the air pollution system especially in long range transmission compared to other wireless transmission techniques and the power consumption of the system is also considerably lower than the existing systems and also some actuation techniques would be discussed and demonstrated.”