Graz Institute of Technology develops roadside sensors to measure vehicle emissions

[ Instrument Network Instrument Development ] According to foreign media reports, researchers at the Graz Institute of Technology (TU Graz) in Austria are working with European partners to research new technologies for measuring vehicle emissions.

Today, air pollution is one of the biggest challenges facing European cities. As part of the 2020 vision research project CARES (Remote Sensing of Urban Air Emissions), an international research consortium is studying new non-contact vehicle exhaust gas measurements with a view to enabling municipalities to adopt emission reduction measures. Specifically, the researchers hope to develop a new type of sensor that can be mounted on a roadside, crash barrier or traffic light to detect exhaust emissions from passing vehicles in a matter of seconds.

Alexander Bergmann, director of the Institute of Electronic Sensor Systems at the Graz Institute of Technology, said: "We want to detect vehicle emissions in urban and urban environmental areas under real conditions without interfering with naturally flowing traffic. Our goal is to use such measurements. Detecting the emission level of each vehicle exhaust. For example, the city can introduce an emission charging policy. The higher the vehicle emissions, the higher the charging; the vehicles that automatically enter the urban environmental area are only allowed to discharge within the standard range. Urban roadblocks will automatically open; in addition, sensor technology can also identify and expel such vehicles if the engine of the vehicle is increased by a manually manipulated particulate filter or a chip that can be adjusted for pollutant emissions, resulting in increased pollutant emissions. vehicle.

Bergmann expects to achieve mass production of this low-cost emission measurement remote sensor by the end of the 2022 project. Currently, the first test conducted by the institute uses a traditional tuning fork that uses laser pulses to excite pollutant particles between the tuning forks, which in turn produce an acoustic signal. The sound signal from each particle is recorded and played back by the tuning fork. The more particles, the louder the sound becomes. The volume of such sounds can then be used to determine how much contaminant particles are in the environment.

Currently, this technology has been successfully used for gas measurement. Bergmann said: "Our research institute has demonstrated for the first time that this technology can be used to measure particles and it is possible to become a low-cost sensor." Researchers at the Graz Institute of Technology hope that the measurement method will prove its value in cities such as Milan, Prague and Krakow. As part of the CARES project, the above cities will test the technology on site.

(Original title: Graz Institute of Technology develops roadside sensors to measure the emissions of passing vehicles)