SpecifiCity: Enhancing calibration process in gas sensors for Air Quality Smart application in Smart Cities

Challenge

Smart Cities need a complementary and reliable solution to extend current network of weather stations with a fine grain monitoring based on cost-effective, reliable and trustable air quality stations. Current solutions are very expensive and not offering a suitable data quality due to cross-sensitivity, fatigue and lack of extended calibration processes. For that reason Specificity aims to offer a high accuracy to measure in a precise way and in real time the air quality in the different points of the city innovating in new advanced processing capabilities for analogue signals with STM and innovations in calibration processes for gases with Fraunhofer. Thereby, cities will be able to obtain reliable air quality data to carry out informed decision-making for promoting a better quality of life, mobility plans, and vision for the city sustainability.

Solution

This project will carry out a system integration-type Application Experiment (AE) which will create a disruptive solution to Air Quality monitoring. Nowadays, electrochemical-type gas sensors are commonly used to detect the presence of pollutants/acids in the air. These sensors present a complex calibration process, high maintenance cost and low data accuracy. HOPU aims to develop and validate algorithms for calibration of gas sensors, anomalies detection, cross-sensitivity mitigation and fatigue compensation based on embedded data processing.

FED4SAE Support

The corrosive Gases and Gas Sensor Testbeds from Fraunhofer IISB have provided all the necessary equipment to expose the sensors to different concentrations of gas, temperature and humidity, which allow us to generate the necessary datasets to train and validate the algorithms and additionally to contrast and validate the experiments carried out in our laboratory and as well as the accuracy of the calibration process for our air quality solution.

STM32 industrial platform have provided us all the necessary support in order to apply the algorithms and thus obtain the concentration of gas sensors in streaming (real-time). Regarding the device, gases concentration calculations have been carried out and the collection of the rest of the parameters calculated by through the specifically defined algorithms. In conclusion, STM32 platform has been/is crucial to enable the necessary processing capabilities.

Impact

Towards a leader position at worldwide level in industrial sector on the development and manufacture of gas monitoring devices, the differentiation of HOPU solution is based on quality and unique added value, raising its competitiveness. HOPU will gain clear market advantage in terms of the enhancement of the accuracy in a cost affordable way and high compatibility of calibrated sensors with platforms and IoT/Smart Cities ecosystems.

The final product as outcome of the project is to manage to unify the physical world (device) with the virtual world (platform) as a Cyber Physical System (CPS). The results will be integrated in the Smart Spot product, adding the intelligence and algorithms to enable a new standards of data quality, reliability, trustability and specificity capabilities from gas sensors.

SpecifiCity will boost the competitiveness of HOPU thanks to the innovative solution which will add value and impact over smart cities market. In addition, the project will have also a positive impact over environment and health/society, since the opportunity to rise awareness and promote sustainability informed decision making for our cities built on top of trustable and reliable data sources

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