An ANN-Based Electronic Nose for Monitoring Pollutant Gases in Landfills

Biogas generated from urban solid waste degradation in landfills is composed of various types of gases, some of them are very toxic and harmful to the health of both humans and animals, and contribute directly to global warming as well. In this way, the monitoring of biogas concentration in landfills and their surroundings is very important because this can assess the air contamination around landfills, as well as to propose means to minimize it. In this work, an electronic nose for gas identification and measurement of gases present in landfill biogas using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is introduced. The ANN training data have been collected by the developed electronic nose, which consisted on a set of low-cost gas sensors and on a signal acquisition system controlled by the LabViewsoftware. After the ANN training, a neural architecture has been obtained and implemented in a microcontrolled digital system to measure different gas concentrations, mainly, methane. The main results of the proposed ANN-based Electronic Nose show that it was possible to measure the gases concentrations, with RMSE less than 1%, for the most of target gases, confirming the accuracy of the developed system.