Recent Advances in Low-Cost Chemical Sensor Technologies for Environmental Monitoring Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Global warming and climate change are serious environmental threats at global level. Air pollution due to the rapid urbanization is one of the major reasons of environmental deterioration. The emission of air-pollutants and toxic gases such as nitrogen oxides (NO_x), ozone (O₃), carbon monoxide (CO), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), including Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are extremely dangerous for ecosystems and human beings. Particulate matter (PM₁₀, PM_2.5, PM_1.0 and Ultrafine Particles) is highly nocive for public health and environment. Greenhouse gases (GHG), including carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) are the main drivers of global warming. Thus, their continuous monitoring at high spatial-temporal resolution is crucial to prevent environmental disasters.

Air quality monitoring based on low-cost sensor technologies is very popular for several emerging applications such as citizen science, community sensing, public health protection, environmental information, smart city planning, environmental monitoring and sustainability.

Current sensor technologies include several types of transducers and system configurations, evolving quickly with different open questions and considerable challenges in terms of sensitivity, selectivity, stability, limit of detection, accuracy, calibration, repeatability, and so on. The evolution of sensor performance for air quality monitoring by networked low-cost sensor-systems equipped by artificial intelligence (AI) is crucial for future applications in real scenario.

This Special Issue will focus on chemical sensor technology, gas sensors, particulate matter sensors/detectors, greenhouse gas devices, sensor-nodes, hardware and software innovations, data communication, system integration, sensor evaluation, processing/correction algorithms, Machine Learning, new environmental solutions, and applications for air pollution monitoring. Proper calibration techniques are necessary, both in the laboratory and in field applications of single sensors and networked sensor-systems for environmental monitoring. Wireless sensor networks combined with modelling and chemical weather forecasting will be considered for smart city applications, including case-studies of air quality experimental campaigns and environmental measurements in urban hot spots.

In this Special Issue, we invite front-line researchers and authors to submit original researches and review articles on exploring Recent Advances in Low-Cost Chemical Sensor Technologies for Environmental Monitoring Applications.

The areas of particular interest to this Special Issue include but are not limited to:

• Low-cost air quality sensors (gas, VOCs, PM);
• Chemical sensors;
• GHG sensors;
• Chemical sensor-nodes and system development;
• Chemical sensor calibration;
• Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for chemical sensors;
• Wireless sensor networks for chemical sensing;
• Urban air pollution monitoring by chemical sensors;
• Chemical sensors for environmental measurements;
• Chemical sensors for smart cities IoT applications;
• Chemical sensors for case-studies in experimental campaigns;
• New concepts and trends in air quality sensors.

Prof. Dr. Michele Penza
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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