Autonomous Remote Gas Sensing: Web-Based Monitoring Of Greenhouse Gases

The control and quantification of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is becoming increasing important in today's society; from a regulatory perspective, the need to reduce GHGs in order to comply with international directives such as the Kyoto Protocol; from an industrial perspective, the handling and potential utilisation of GHGs arising from their activities; from a social perspective, the mitigation of the harmful effects attributed to GHGs along with maintaining a healthy local environment. Intrinsic to the fulfilment of each of these is the capacity to adequately monitor GHGs. However, long-term sensing at source presents a number of logistical challenges: sensor performance, time duration reliability and, perhaps most significantly, cost viability.This paper describes the development of autonomous gas sensing platforms with webbased accessibility. The focus has been on achieving long-term reliable performance at a price-point that enables the deployment of multiple distributed systems. Such a wireless sensor network exhibits extensive temporal and spatial resolution, thus defining GHG emissions over the course of time and area for the deployment location in question. This work has been principally targeted at monitoring landfill gas in collaboration with the Irish Environmental Protection Agency. The decomposition of biodegradable waste generates methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) these gases must be thermally oxidised by flaring or preferably running an engine if sufficient methane quality. The benefits of autonomous remote gas sensing are twofold: firstly, it will serve to protect local environment by detecting and preventing gas migration beyond the landfill facility perimeter; secondly, it can be used to determine the gas generation potential at various points within the landfill, thus ensuring that the engine or flare receive an adequate supply to maintain optimum operation. Furthermore, these platforms have been employed in different application areas, including quantifying GHG emissions from peat-lands and measuring surface emission from lagoons in wastewater treatment plants.The web-based accessibility of deployed systems signifies the near real-time accessibility to data. The remote monitoring achieved by these bespoke platforms provides insight into the characteristics of gas emission sources which, in turn, can contribute significantly towards the optimised management of GHG emissions.