COVER STORY
Air quality sensors at the forefront of design for the IoT
The importance of air quality Pete Bailey, Field Applications Engineer at Anglia A
ir quality, for long a hot topic due to its association with the health of the environment and individuals, has been boosted further up the agenda of governments, businesses and individuals by the pandemic. It is well documented that poor outdoor air quality is linked to a significant detrimental effect on long term health and can also exacerbate existing health conditions. Some studies have highlighted patients with COVID are at greater risk of suffering more severe complications if they have experienced long term exposure to poor air quality.
As a result, there is now renewed focus on gas sensors for measuring air quality. Pete Bailey, Field Applications Engineer at Anglia introduces a Renesas platform that offers customers access to decades of knowledge, know-how and data allowing them to create low power and high accuracy IoT-ready gas and air quality monitoring solutions.
8 May 2021 Components in Electronics
Poor air quality is commonly associated with outdoor environments where pollutants from vehicles and factory emissions are known contributors, however indoor air quality is also becoming a very important consideration particularly in public buildings such as schools and offices but also domestic environments where it is beneficial to have good air quality for health benefits and comfort reasons. Modern buildings are designed to be well insulated to reduce their impact on the environment, however unless provisions are also made for adequate ventilation these environments can have an increased build-up of pollutants in the air. The source of these indoor pollutants is many and varied and range from cooking odours, CO2 and aerosols. Sensors that can reliably and accurately measure air quality can play an import role in the future of building and ventilation control systems. There is a further specific challenge in monitoring air quality in refrigerated storage facilities, where odours can both affect the taste of the stored food, and be an indicator of issues such as decay.
The Renesas ZMOD platform
Renesas are at the forefront of air quality sensing with their ZMOD gas sensor platform the industry’s most
accurate and flexible gas sensing platform. These integrated digital sensor modules provide best-in-class stability and sensitivity for indoor air quality (IAQ), outdoor air quality (OAQ) and refrigeration air quality (RAQ) monitoring. In addition to being chemically and electrically calibrated, the platform’s flexible interface enables software configurable indoor, outdoor, and refrigeration air quality sensing solutions. Renesas’ gas sensors are capable of accurate detection of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and ozone (O3), and utilise advanced sensing materials with more than 15 years of proven stability and reliability. The platform benefits from Renesas rich history of developing precision ASICs that are accurate, energy-efficient, and provide maximum flexibility through software-configurability. The combination of this ASIC design experience for the sensing control and their sensing materials expertise are the strengths on which the capabilities of the ZMOD platform rest.
The ZMOD platform exploits three key factors: materials, temperature, and time. The MOx material delivers outstanding sensitivity to air quality contaminants, with a well-controlled manufacturing process developed and demonstrated over many years. The ability to vary operating temperature and time at temperature rest on the capabilities of the Renesas ASIC.
The ZMOD platform leverages these three critical parameters to create a tuneable system for reliable detection of a wide range of target gases to optimize
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