The starting point for improving environmental quality is monitoring. However, traditional methods focus on the simple display of real-time data and usually only at a few locations.
Often, the information displayed lacks context, and it is difficult for decision makers to use when managing environmental quality.
CAUSE
Conventional air pollution monitoring at a single location involves measurements by a suite of sensors having different technologies from different manufacturers - integrated and housed in a rather bulky shipping container.
The air sample to be monitored is generally sucked in from a particular location by means of a pump, & routed into different chambers through conduits connected to the suite of sensors.
The air sub-samples are then analyzed by different sensors to give in-vitro estimates of the different parameters constituting the air quality.
Therefore, monitoring of air pollution at a single location with the disparate sensors of varying sensitivities, accuracies and temporal responses, not only pose significant challenges in data acquisition and assimilation, but also, involves significantly high costs in order to arrive at digestible information for researchers, policy makers as well as the common public.
PARADIGM SHIFT TO NEW SCIENCE
Against this backdrop, we present an innovative photonic system Air Unique-Quality Monitoring (AUM) capable of real time remote monitoring of various air parameters simultaneously, to arrive at the in-situ air quality at a particular location, or the spatial patterns (contours) of air quality covering a substantial Euclidian space - thus enabling eulerian as well as lagrangian measurements having multifarious advantages.
AUM was extensively evaluated in the laboratory as well as in the field, and was found to be good; yielding air quality estimates at very high sampling frequencies with higher sensitivity and accuracy.
AUM was designed and developed using COTS (commercially-off-the-shelf) technologies, thus making it significantly cheaper for wider deployment, in consonance with WHO's roadmap.
The uniqueness and novelty of AUM lies in its ability to innovatively apply the concepts of laser back scattering, artificial intelligence and machine (deep) learning to identify, classify and quantify various air pollutants simultaneously.
CUSTOMIZED DEVELOPMENT
Under the Clean Air Act, EPA is required to regulate emissions of hazardous air pollutants. This original list included 189 pollutants. Since 1990, EPA has modified the list through rulemaking to include 187 hazardous air pollutants. https://www.epa.gov/haps/initial-list-hazardous-air-pollutants-modifications
There are more than 75000 VOC's.
Specific analyzers are only available for specific gases or mixture of gases.
AUM can be customized, calibrated and validated for any type of gases or mixture of gases as per requirement in shortest time.
This construes that in changing processes or demand or extension in compliances, hardware is not required to be changed. New gases can easily be customized, calibrated, updated and system is ready to go live in few days.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND PREDICTION
Discovering what we don't know from Gases
Discovering major pollutants.
Discovering ambient levels of benzene in the immediate vicinity of Gas stations.
In case of accidents or gas leakages retrieving data from past for post mortem and investigating the mixture of gases and especially fugitive strain of gases that are not calibrated by AUM system.
Obtaining predictive, actionable insight from data
Action against to reduce the pollutant are by taking various social precautionary measures.
Providing Live Dashboard to Pollution Control board, NEWS channel and Pollution of Billboards.
Creating Data Products that have business impact.
Communicating relevant business stories from data and building confidence in decisions that drive business value.
Providing insight from heat map the best habitat geo location in city that is of least of pollution.