AAAR 37th Annual Conference October 14 - October 18, 2019 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Response of Eight Low-Cost Particle Sensors and Consumer Device to Typical Indoor Emission Events
YANGYANG ZOU, Matthew Young, Andrew May, Jordan Clark, The Ohio State University
Abstract Number: 104 Working Group: Indoor Aerosols
Abstract Low-cost particle sensors may have the potential to transform smart building systems by providing continuous or semi-continuous measurements of indoor air quality. However, due to the rapid growth in the marketplace of available particle sensors, the practical use of some of the technologies is uncertain due to a lack of a rigorous evaluation of their performance. In this study, we evaluated a suite of these products, including three bare sensors (BS) and five integrated devices (ID; which contain one or more of these sensors and often some additional features such as wireless connectivity). Using a test home on The Ohio State University campus, we co-located these sensors with reference instruments for nearly three months. Over the duration, we generated particles inside the home using several common sources of indoor particles, including burning incense, candles, and toast; using deodorizing and disinfecting sprays; operating a humidifier; and opening the windows.
All of the BS and ID were able to respond to the different sources, but in general, the magnitude of the responses varied for the different sensors. For example, the ratio of the time-integrated mass concentration from the sensors to the reference instruments varied from close to zero to greater than three. Moreover, there were some source-specific response effects that appear to be related to the size distributions of the particle sources; for some sources, the sensors’ response was linear with a slope and coefficient of determination (R2) close to unity, but in other cases, the slopes and R2 values were much poorer. Performance was generally best when source of particles was an open window, which is consistent with many field evaluation studies of these low-cost particle sensors.