AAAR 35th Annual Conference October 17 - October 21, 2016 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
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Performance of Four Consumer-Grade Air Pollution Measurement Devices
SYDONIA MANIBUSAN, Gediminas Mainelis, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Abstract Number: 73 Working Group: Indoor Aerosols
Abstract There is a developing trend in consumer electronics to design inexpensive (<$300) devices that could be used indoors for monitoring airborne contaminants of human health concern. Most of these devices monitor the mass concentration of PM2.5 and PM10 particles, temperature, and relative humidity while some also advertise monitoring of volatile organic Compounds (VOCs) or other chemical pollutants. This study focused on four recently released devices, the Air Quality Egg 2, Blueair Aware, Foobot, and Speck, which utilize optical sensors to measure the concentration of airborne particulate matter. The devices were collocated and operated simultaneously in several home environments over 7 days for each household against established optical sensing devices including the PersonalDataRAM (pDR-1000, Thermo Fisher), DustTrak DRX (TSI Inc.), and gravimetric mass measurements using two collocated Personal Modular Impactors (PMI2.5, SKC, Inc.). Results have shown that some consumer grade devices were in reasonable agreement with some of the used reference instruments. For example, the BlueAir Aware and Air Quality Egg 2 registered 24-hour averages of PM2.5 as 23.5 µg/m3 and 13.8 µg/m3, respectively, for one of the households. The gravimetric mass measurement yielded an average PM2.5 concentration of 14.6 µg/m3. On the other hand, the 24-hour PM average for the same household was 6.4 µg/m3 as registered by the DustTrakDRX and 4.7 µg/m3 as registered by the pDR. Similar trends were observed for other households. The data show the utility of the consumer-grade devices, especially due to low cost allowing their wide-scale deployment; however, testing in various environments and with different particles and at different concentrations is needed to ascertain consumer-grade instrument accuracy for application in field studies.