Articles

AUG and UofT SOCAAR to carry out new project for Industrial Air Quality Monitoring

AUG Signals is delighted to be a part of the new academic-industry collaborative project with the Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research (SOCAAR) at the University of Toronto.

This is a one-year project where the partners will expand AirSENCE, an advanced, accurate and afforable Continuous Ambient Air Quality Micro-Monitoring Station (caaqMMS)  to   AirSENCE-FIM (Fence-line and Industrial Monitoring) for pilot tests at selected strategic locations in the industrial manufacturing communities.

AirSENCE-FIM is a new product line that involves the integration of new sensors and the added capabilities to measure VOC and H₂S, as well as improvements to the sensitivity, longevity and seasonal accuracy shifts of the original AirSENCE devices. This industry-academic collaboration will help AirSENCE remain competitive in the smart cities landscape. Through offering new fence-line monitoring capabilities, AirSENCE will be able to better meet the expectations of clients operating within communities near major industrial emitters (oil sands, mining, pulp and paper, refineries and etc.)

Increased awareness of air pollution and its health impacts means there is a fast-growing need worldwide to monitor air quality. However, current low-cost air quality sensors have shortcomings with respect to sensor drift and degradation, which, along with interference effects from temperature and humidity, create challenges to acquire accurate data for long-term air quality analyses.  Through continuous investment as well as collaboration with air quality experts at SOCAAR, AUG aims to overcome these market challenges and further enforce the user confidence in the accuracy and reliability of AirSENCE. The new AirSENCE-FIM will further expand AUG Signals’ environmental monitoring product portfolio and create an affordable and sustainable solution for industrial communities.

This project is funded and supported by the NSERC Alliance – Ontario Center of Excellence VIP Program.

AUG secured new EUROSTARS project titled, “AQUASHIELD”

On Oct 1 2019, AUG won a 3-year funding investment under the Industrial Research Assistance Program. AUG joined its partners KTH in Sweden, ALPES in Switzerland, and DBC in Belgium to kick off a new EUROSTARS project named “AQUASHIELD”.

AQUASHIELD aims to develop a fast, reliable and cost-effective tool for online water quality monitoring, in order to detect toxic agents and dangerous substances in the municipal sewage wastewater network, such as drugs, explosives and related precursors. The AQUASHIELD water monitoring system will realize the integration of laser-based Mid-Infrared (Mid-IR) spectroscopy and UV-Vis spectroscopy via machine learning chemometrics algorithms and fog computing architecture. The integrated system is expected to automatically complete one water sample analysis from the initial sample intake to the final test results within less than five (5) minutes. All of the sensor data and final test results can be easily accessed both locally and remotely via a customized Internet of Things (IoT) platform, which will meet the needs by various operational conditions in term of data network and power awareness. The AQUASHIELD system will also feature a very compact hardware configuration and can be installed at strategic locations within the municipal sewage network. Upon the successful completion of this project, the integrated AQUASHIELD system will be fully validated at laboratories and it will be preliminarily tested against selected field validation scenarios.