Air Quality Monitoring in a Near-City Industrial Zone by Low-Cost Sensor Technologies: A Case Study

Urban industrial areas are often a matter of concern due to the emission of air pollutants that may affect the air quality of adjacent cities. Aerosol pollutants are monitored by governmental agencies that employ regulatory monitoring stations which are very accurate, but also very expensive, bulky, and demanding in terms of maintenance. For this reason, it often happens that the monitoring of the air quality in large areas is covered by few stations. This situation can lead to the building of air pollutant maps with low spatio-temporal resolution. An appealing way to address this issue is represented by low-cost miniaturized gas sensors (LCSs) employed in low-cost air quality monitors (LCMs). Despite the various and unquestionable points of strength characterizing these devices, the scientific community has raised several warnings about the accuracy of their measurements and issued many caveats regarding their use. In this study, a new LCM model designed and implemented in our laboratories was used to measure the NO2 and PM concentrations in the industrial area of Brindisi (Italy). Data gathered by the LCM were compared with reference instrumentations for a rigorous analysis of the performance achievable through these low-cost technologies in this particular case.