Publications / 2014 Proceedings of the 31st ISARC, Sydney, Australia

Comparative Experimental Evaluation of Dust Sensors for Environmental Monitoring on Construction Sites

A. Carbonari, G. Fava, B. Naticchia
Pages 829-836 (2014 Proceedings of the 31st ISARC, Sydney, Australia, ISBN 978-0-646-59711-9, ISSN 2413-5844)
Abstract:

Fine particle emissions (PM10) from demolition and construction activities are now recognized as significant causes of pollution. So they can cause health hazards both to workers and to people living and working outside the site’s boundary in the local neighbourhood. Although admissible concentration values are defined by national legislation and regulations worldwide, there is no permanent monitoring system in place, yet. Hence, in this paper one step pertaining to the development of a wireless pervasive and real-time monitoring system of dust concentration will be presented. In particular, it will focus on the types of sensors, integrated in the communication network, which can be used to the purpose. In particular, we will compare the performances of two different dust sensors. On principle, they are all suitable for wireless monitoring, but not all the sensors have the same sensitivity to changeable particles diameter sizes and types of dust. So a dedicated laboratory campaign was carried out, in order to compare their performances with the ones of a reference instrument (used as a benchmark). The comparisons show that there is a good agreement between the plots of the wireless real-time tracking system and the benchmark. However, the reliability of the sensors to detect events (e.g. sudden dust concentration variation) and particles with nonuniform particle distribution is different according to the kind of dust sensor which is integrated in the wireless system.

Keywords: Dust tracking, wireless sensor network, health and safety