Determination of the Concentration of PM10 Particulate Matter in areas of the Universidad del Atlántico by using a Sensor Arranged in an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Today, air pollution has become one of the main concerns of citizens worldwide, due to the exponential increase in the number of vehicles, industrial activities, combustion processes, among other sources of pollutant emissions. Consequently, the human being has seen the need to create innovative strategies that reduce the mortality and / or morbidity rates due to air pollutants. Given the above, and added to the high costs of conventional equipment to measure air quality, in this project an alternative technique was developed for the measurement of environmental parameters; in this case, using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), equipped with an optical particle sensor and a temperature and relative humidity sensor, both sensors being programmed with the Arduino Ethernet microcontroller. Finally, for the validity of the data, a calibration of the particle sensor was carried out through a simultaneous comparison with data from an automatic equipment designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), called BAM-1020, finding the influence of relative humidity. in the correlation of the particle sensor against the reference equipment (R2 = 0.3 to 0.5). Subsequently, PM10 concentrations were detected through sweeps in areas of the university campus and its surroundings, finding compliance with the concentrations detected according to local (Resolution 2254) and international (WHO) regulations.