Review of performance of Low-cost Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring

A growing number of companies started commercialising low-cost sensors (LCS) that are said to be able to monitor air pollution in outdoor air. The benefit about the use of LCS is the increased spatial coverage when monitoring air quality in cities and remote locations. Today, there are hundreds of LCSs commercially available on the market with a cost ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand euro. At the same time, independent evaluation of the performance of LCSs against reference measurements is only available in literature for about 110 LCSs in literature. These studies report that LCS are unstable and often affected by atmospheric condition, cross sensitivities from interfering compounds that may change LCS performance depending on site location. In this work, quantitative data about the performance of tested LCS against reference measurement are presented. This information was gathered from published reports and relevant testing laboratories. Other information was drawn from peer-reviewed journals that tested different types of LCSs in research studies. Relevant metrics about the comparison of LCSs systems against reference systems highlighted the most cost-effective LCSs that could be used to monitor air quality pollutants with a good level of agreement represented by a coefficient of determination of R2 > 0.75 and slope close to 1.0. This review highlights the possibility to have versatile LCSs able to operate with multiple pollutants and preferably with transparent LCS data treatment.

KARAGULIAN Federico;  BARBIERE Maurizio;  KOTSEV Alexander;  SPINELLE Laurent;  GERBOLES Michel;  LAGLER Friedrich;  REDON Nathalie;  CRUNAIRE Sabine;  BOROWIAK Annette; 

2019-10-02

MDPI

JRC117372

2073-4433 (online),   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC117372,   

10.3390/atmos10090506 (online),