Particulate Matter in sizes below 10 microns has received a lot of attention in recent years. Industrial emissions, exhaust from mainly diesel powered cars and trucks, smoke from furnaces, including homes, and dust from streets are more and more recognized as a major health hazard, not only for elderly citizens and children, but for anyone. Read what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the USA has to say about this problem by clicking here.

Cities often cope with that by putting up expensive containers packed with high-tech sensors and analyzers – great gear, but rather expensive, and 2 or 3 sites for a city of 2 Million people are simply not able to do the job.

ADCON – an alternative to container sized analyzers

In cooperation with Germanies leading manufacturer of dust monitors Adcon can offer a different solution: an ultra-compact cabinet, containing a laser-based particle monitor for all particles from PM 10 down to PM1. This stations is extremely easy to install and maintain. The station can monitor all relevant parameters in very short intervals and transmit them back to base:

• dust particle size (PM10, PM2.5, PM1) and quantity
• wind speed and direction
• air temperature, relative humidity and pressure
• precipitation

Within Q2 of 2009 we will furthermore release an extra set of sensors to be mounted inside the dust monitor, allowing to also monitor CO, NO2, O3 and SO2, turning the Dust Monitor into a full scale air quality monitoring station - and an incredibly low cost!

The ADCON advantage

Rather than sampling with extremely expensive equipment on two or three sites only it makes much more sense to put stations up in a grid over the whole city, covering specifically areas where the population is known to be rather susceptible to such dangers (e.g. near hospitals, schools and homes for elderly or children), and in areas that are the source of dust, like construction sites, landfills, major traffic arteries and coal-burning power plants or similar industrial compounds.

An Adcon dust monitoring station is extremely easy to install and very flexible. It can be relocated to another site in a matter of minutes. If built around an A733 GPRS RTU it is also completely independent of any infrastructure other than GSM coverage.