AirU Pollution Monitoring Network

AirU is a collaboration between various engineering disciplines at the University of Utah. The AirU group was formed in 2016 with the help of a generous grant from the National Science Foundation. The goal of the organization is to create a temporally and spatially dense air quality dataset of the Salt Lake Valley through the deployment of thousands of custom low-cost air quality sensor nodes (AirU Pollution Monitors). The current generation of AirU Pollution Monitor makes use of a number of onboard sensors to measure air quality information in real time, including optical particle counter, temperature and humidity sensor, CO and NOx sensors, as well as GPS and SD card. Data is periodically uploaded to the AirU database, where it is made available as is to researchers, lawmakers, and the community at large. The ultimate goal of the AirU project is to design and implement a new generation of mobile air quality monitors that make use of a custom-designed passive, low-energy particle counter, various energy-scavenging techniques, and a novel, low-power wireless communication protocol that will allow thousands of air quality monitors to autonomously and reliably sample pollution data in the Salt Lake Valley.

This research effort is funded by the National Science Foundation CPS grant 1646408.