Blog 1

Welcome to my Week 1 Senior Project Blog!

This week, I focused on laying a strong research foundation to understand how I can best leverage LiDAR for air quality monitoring purposes.

I began by examining existing research on LiDAR’s applications to figure out how it is used for environmental monitoring.

I first read “Urban Air Pollution Monitoring Using Scanning Lidar.” This study provided detailed insights into how scanning LiDAR systems have been used to detect pollutant concentrations across urban landscapes. I learned that LiDAR’s ability to emit laser pulses and measure the backscatter signal from these pulses can be used to detect the presence of airborne particles, including PM2.5, which is what my developed sensor will detect. However, I also found out that LiDAR has limitations such as being more sensitive to weather conditions and not being able to detect very fine particles, and PM2.5 is a very fine particle.

As a result, I began researching various air quality sensors that measure PM2.5. I focused on laser scattering sensors, which measure particulate matter by detecting the amount of light scattered by airborne particles. They are highly sensitive to fine particles, which make them ideal for PM2.5 monitoring. 

As a LiDAR approach can not simply detect PM2.5 by itself, it must be combined with another air quality sensor to accurately detect the concentration of PM2.5 in the air. LiDAR is useful for detecting particle presence and has the ability to cover a wide detection area, while laser scattering sensors have high accuracy in detecting PM2.5 concentrations and can differentiate between fine particles. 

In order to learn how to integrate these sensors, I started reading “The Art of Electronics.” I reviewed basic circuit concepts such as voltage and current, which are essential for designing sensor circuits. I also read a chapter on op-amps and analog signal processing. This chapter was really useful because I plan to use op-amps for amplifying the signals from the air quality sensors. I noted down how to configure different op-amp circuits such as inverting and non-inverting amplifiers.

One challenge I faced was not being able to figure out how to synchronize the data from LiDAR and the laser scattering sensors. I realized that accurate timing and data processing are a must in order to reliably detect the concentration of PM2.5, so I will explore microcontroller integration in the next phase.

Stay tuned for more updates on my work!