Scientists develop indigenous system for real-time remote monitoring of air quality parameters

Scientists at Gayatri Vidya Parishad-Scientific and Industrial Research Centre in Visakhapatnam have developed an indigenous system for real-time remote monitoring of air quality parameters, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) said on Friday.

The Air Unique-quality Monitoring (AUM) system is an innovative application of the principles of laser backscattering, statistical mechanics, optoelectronics, artificial intelligence, machine/deep learning, and Internet of Things, a statement said.

It can identify, classify and quantify various pollutants simultaneously (of orders of less than one part per billion) and meteorological parameters, with very high precision, sensitivity and accuracy, it said.

With the support from DST's Clean Air Research Initiative, professor Rao Tatavarti, the director of Gayatri Vidya Parishad-Scientific and Industrial Research Centre (GVP-SIRC) and GVP College of Engineering in Visakhapatnam, has developed the system.

Professor P Arulmozhivarman from the School of Electrical Engineering, VIT University in Vellore and a few others were part of Tatavarti's team.

The AUM system was successfully evaluated during laboratory trials. It was also compared in the field with imported systems from France and Australia, and operated by the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board under the aegis of the Central Pollution Control Board of India, the statement said.

The system had CATS Eco-Systems, Nashik as the technology transfer partner for commercialisation.

"It has been found to be highly sensitive and accurate and capable of simultaneous detection and quantification of all air quality parameters and offers a number of merits over any of the currently available conventional systems," the statement said.

It is portable, compact, low powered and economical, works on plug and play systems, requires no setting up time, and no additional civil infrastructure for housing.

The system also provides information on all gases and meteorological parameters simultaneously.

"It is a non-intrusive remote, real-time monitoring system with very high sensitivities and accuracies and is capable of monitoring in both spatial and temporal domains, with very high sampling frequencies," the statement said.

"Also, the data from spatially separated sensors can be seamlessly streamed to a cloud server, from where digestible real-time encrypted information on the dashboard is made available to users at any part of the world," it added.