Tag: scentroid

How Smart Cities are Using Scentinal SL50 to Map Air Quality

According to WHO, more than 5.5 million people worldwide die each year as a result of air pollution. Many of these deaths occur in large cities, where exhaust, factories, and other industries fill the air with pollutants. WHO issued in 2005 the air quality guidelines (AQG) with the intent to achieve the protection of public health worldwide. Special mention in the AQG is given to specific pollutants that should be addressed to improve the air we breathe. These pollutants are Ozone (O3), Particulate matter, Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and Sulphur dioxide (SO2). These can be encountered easily in all cities and are generated by urban activities.

Traditionally, ambient air quality is measured by fixed regulatory monitoring stations. This achieves high accuracy in measuring pollutant concentrations at that specific point. Environmental regulators rely on exposure assessment techniques to calculate “spatial” predictions of pollutant concentration for urban areas. Unfortunately, they use limited data gathered from these monitoring stations. Even though the data is highly accurate, it is limited due to the high cost of AQM stations.

Air pollution exposure assessment techniques have helped to address the limitations of data coverage. However, they still fall short of accurately calculating local pollutant levels. Limitations of these approaches conclude they cannot characterize fine-scale gradients below 1 km2 that drive population exposure to local emissions. These include traffic, construction sites and local industrial pollutants. Dispersion models involve uncertainty as they require emission data that commonly represents a snap-shot of emissions from the sources.

In response to growing concerns over the effects of air pollution, cities have improved their efforts to measure air quality. Singapore, Barcelona, London, and San Francisco have begun using affordable compact air quality monitors. Using new data, cities can map areas of high concentration of pollutants, track changes over time, identify pollution sources, analyze potential interventions, and eventually provide a baseline for future urban plans.

Urban air quality and pollutants

Many pollutants affect the air of a metropolis. Ground-level ozone and fine particulates are identified as the most relevant pollutants for an air quality monitoring system. This is based on their effect on human health and variations in concentrations within short distances.

Ground-level ozone is a threat to the respiratory system and lung function. Long exposure to O3 can involve health problems such as asthma and bronchitis. Moreover, respiratory diseases due to O3 can anticipate death. Many studies highlight the risks for human health due to exposure to O3.

Particulate is very dangerous for human health. The inhalation of fine particulate matter can cause serious respiratory system problems. These include asthma, lung cancer, respiratory disease, gestational complications, and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, long-term exposure to particulate matter such as PM2.5 and PM10 increases risks of premature mortality, similar to O3.

Other urban pollutants such as sulphur dioxide (SO2) and Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) are associated with combustion processes. These are generally found in the atmosphere in close association with other primary pollutants, including ultrafine particulates. They are itself toxic and precursors of O3.

Green Smart City

A smart city is an urban area that uses different types of electronic data collection sensors. This is done to supply information used to manage assets and resources efficiently. Therefore, A smart city is more prepared to respond to challenges than a city with a simple “transactional” relationship with its citizens.

Smart cities leverage technology to improve the performance of public services and to create huge economic benefits. Examples of these benefits can be improvements in water management, waste management, parking, lighting and others. Smart City Platforms are designed to integrate services creating added value greater than the sum of its parts. The SCP is integrated by data sources, data analysis and information. Sources of data are used to feed the SCP through a variety of input sources. These include citizens, smart sensors, real-time systems, processed data and legacy systems.

Scentroid Technology for Smart Air Quality Monitoring

Scentroid’s advanced sensing technology allows smart cities to monitor multiple air quality parameters using an accurate, compact monitoring station. The Scentinal SL50. Scentinal can be configured with a variety of sensors to measure pollutants such as O3, NO2, SO2, PM 2,5,10. It can also be configured to monitor noise and radiation to near reference accuracy. The low cost, minimal maintenance, and compact form have allowed cities to deploy numerous Scentinals to better understand pollutant levels.

Scentinal collects data and sends it to our cloud-based platform. It uses built-in high-performance computing to bring artificial intelligence to any street corner. It warns authorities of rising pollutant levels, possible sources, and accurate predictions of pollutant levels for the next 48 hours.

Scentinal Delivers Accurate and Reliable Data for Citizens

The role of Scentinal in Smart cities is providing accurate, reliable air quality data with improved spatial and temporal resolution. Generally, air pollutants have strong spatial gradients over short distances as city planning configurations are not always ideal. Sources of pollution will be unevenly distributed, therefore the need for an increased number of monitors is ever-growing. Beijing metropolitan area, for example, has a total of 23 regulatory monitoring stations distributed within 1,368 Km2 to assess air quality for more than 20 million inhabitants.

Scentinal provides near reference air quality monitoring that provides sufficient accuracy and data quality to complement the existing air quality regulatory stations with the advantage of reduced operating costs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has published the Air Sensor Guidebook EPA600/R-14-159, which defines how an instrument performs in comparison to Federal Reference methods or Federal Equivalent methods and defines an acceptable expanded uncertainty between 20% and 30% for these types of devices. Scentroid instruments have been tested by various agencies including the Italian Research institute CNR and the accuracy has been recorded to be within 5-10% of reference stations. This amazing accomplishment has been the result of years of research and development conducted by Scentroid on areas of self-calibration, digital noise cancellation algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

Scentinal has the capability to work as a Plug and Play device as it can be configured to work with any smart city platform. Scentinal will transmit data in real-time with a dedicated API to allow rapid deployment into any smart city platform. This allows seamless integration and scalability of the air quality monitoring network by easily logging the equipment ID into the smart city platform; Scentinal will be on-line once it is powered ON and connected to the internet.

An intelligent workflow allows an automated machine-to-machine communication for predictive maintenance and calibration as required, this capability will be available at the user interface. Scentinal can be also configured with an alarm system to inform those locations when pollutants are exceeding the selected air quality thresholds. This will allow the user to visually detect the locations in which exceedances are occurring in real-time. Integrating an intelligent network of air quality sensors into a smart city will allow understanding air quality data as it relies on traffic patterns, factory schedules and other human activities.

By publishing all data collected using the Scentinal intelligent monitoring stations will serve as a baseline to address air quality health-related issues such as asthma, or to increase life expectancy including other associated benefits such as improvements in urban planning to reduce traffic pollution or to properly relocate industry hubs to minimize impacts of industrial operations.

The backbone of any SCP will rely on communications to transmit data gathered by hundreds of thousands of devices. Scentinal can be configured to fulfill any communication requirement, from Wireless communication such as LORA to 4G infrastructures, making it an ideal instrument for SCP seamless integration.

Scentinal network was designed to be controlled remotely across the existing network infrastructure, therefore monitoring sensor health, firmware upgrades, and remote calibration is a matter of only a few clicks.

Sensor accuracy and precision

Scentroid accuracy and precision have been tested against FEM (Federal Equivalent MethodUSEPA). Accuracy and precision are calculated by examining the slope and y-intercept of a linear regression equation. Scentinal results showed comparable results to the FEM monitor with expanded uncertainty <10%. This accuracy is achieved using a variety of techniques new to the industry. Scentroid’s Patented self-calibration technology meets USEPA-600/R-12/531 protocol and allows the system to conduct a full calibration of its sensors every 12 hours similar to the most sophisticated Gas Chromatography based instruments. Other advancements include Scentinal’s hybrid sensing that combines multiple sensing technologies into a single reading using advanced artificial intelligence algorithms for greater accuracy and reliability.

April 18, 2018
Colorado oil and Gas Company hires Canada’s Scentroid to tackle odor complaint around drilling rigs

By Cathy Proctor – Reporter, Denver Business Journal Sep 11, 2017.
Article originally appeared on: https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2017/09/11/tackling-odor-problems-in-the-oil-fields-is.html

An international team of odor experts hired by Denver’s Crestone Peak Resources has spent about a month in Erie. Their camp situated about 30 miles north of downtown Denver. They spend the day tracking smells wafting from an oil and gas drilling rig near the Vista Ridge neighbourhood.

They found smells, but initial field test results in early September failed to find odors from Crestone’s operations. Nothing reached such levels and intensity that they violated Colorado’s regulations. This is according to Ardevan Bakhtari, the founder of Scentroid, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

“No odor episodes were detected that violated Colorado regulations or international regulations,” Bakhtari said Friday at an information seminar. Crestone convened at its regional office in Firestone for nearly 30 state and local officials, industry experts and others.

Scentroid’s Impact

Scentroid, a 15-employee company in business for seven years, has worked around the world. They have helped clients tracking smelly operations such as factories, Qatar’s massive refinery complex and marijuana use in Toronto. The company, which is considering opening a Denver office, also manufactures equipment used to detect and measure odor levels.

In Erie, Scentroid’s team detected odors over the course of two days of tests at sites around the drilling rig. However, the smells didn’t last long enough, nor were they concentrated enough to violate either state or international standards, Bakhtari said.

The lack of violation-level smells from operations doesn’t mean Crestone should expect to be free from odor complaints, Bakhtari said.

The Power of Individual Olfactory and Odor Complaints

A person’s sense of smell, and their decision to categorizing a smell as “good, bad, neutral or nasty,” is subjective. It ranges from which way the wind is blowing to individual taste, he said.

“You have to have a history with an odor to perceive it as good or bad. It depends on the culture and where you live,” he said.

“If you lived in a city, you could have good memories of city smells. If you lived on a farm you could have good memories of manure.”

Nor is Crestone resting easy on the results of Scentroid’s field tests.

Jason Oates, Crestone’s director of external affairs, said Scentroid will continue to analyze samples taken from the Vista Ridge area at their laboratories.

Scentroid’s Odor Results for Colorodo Oil and Gas Company

As for meeting the state’s standards, “the standard is one thing — but if we can do more — economically and reasonably — we’ll try,” Oates said.

Oates said Crestone is already looking at how to reduce smells from a new source Scentroid’s team uncovered. The mud that clings to the drilling pipe as it’s pulled from the wellbore, a routine part of the drilling operation.

Pulling pipe from the wellbore means the pipe — and the mud it’s come through — is pulled dozens of feet into the air. It rises above the massive soundwalls many companies use to contain the lights and sounds of the drilling rigs. In Crestone’s case at the Pratt site, the 100-foot pipe sections were rising some 60 feet above the 40-foot soundwalls.

Oates said Crestone is looking at ways to cut the odors from the mud on the pipes, such as scraping the mud off the pipe as it’s pulled out of the hole and spraying agents on the pipe that are designed to mask odors.

“Measurement is Key to Improvement…”

“Measurement is the key to improvement and we’ll continue to knock things down as we find them,” Oates said.

“We take this very, very seriously,” Crestone’s president and CEO, Tony Buchanon, told the assembled group prior to Bakhtari presentation. “We do everything that we can in our communities to make it [our operations] as painless as possible.”

Crestone’s sensitivity about odors stems from complaints about its operation and Erie’s new odor law, which took effect on Sept. 1. Crestone has warned the town the law is too subjective and may be illegal.

Oates said Crestone personnel talked to Erie officials about the company’s concerns in recent days and agreed to work closely with the town.

Erie officials, including police officers looking into odor complaints from residents, crossed paths with Scentroid team during the field tests, Bakhtari said.

But as of Friday, Crestone hadn’t been notified that its operations had violated Erie’s odor regulations, Oates said.

New Odor Issues Detected

Scentroid’s team focused on the area around the Pratt drilling rig, which is drilling oil and gas wells near the Vista Ridge neighborhood. The site, and the neighborhood, is southwest of Waste Connections’ active landfill operation.

The location complicates the ability of residents — and the town — to track smells back to their source, Bakhtari said.

Some of the smells may come from the drilling rig. The team traced other smells to the landfill. Still others wafted from passing trucks hauling garbage to the landfill — including rock, dirt and mud unearthed by other drilling rigs working in the area, he said.

“The landfill has a much bigger impact [in terms of odor] than the rigs,” Bakhtari said.

Colorado’s regulations on odors, enforced by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, are pretty good — especially since very few states in the U.S. have regulations, he said.

Measurable levels of Odors for Colorado Oil and Gas

Colorado’s regulations rely on measurable levels of odors, which remove the “he said, she said” element from defining nasty smells and enforcing the regulation, Bakhtari said.

An odor violates Colorado’s residential regulations if it’s detectable after the odor’s been diluted by fresh air by a factor of seven or more, and the odor is detected at that level twice in an hour, with the measurements taken at least 15 minutes apart.

Mitigating nasty smells from an operation — any kind of operation — is a tough nut to crack, according to Bakhtari.

Odor is the result of elements in the air that are sniffed by the human nose and associated with something by the brain. Smell is one of man’s primal senses, he said.

The Power of Odor Psychology

“If there were no people in an area, there would be no odor. It’s not a physical thing, and it plays heavily on the psychology of the people who are smelling it,” he said. “We have one gene to hear, three genes to see, 12 to taste and nearly 1,000 genes defining olfactory scents.”

Odor also is something that’s learned over time. Learning to associate one smell with a strawberry, another with gasoline and labelling other smells like fresh bread or coffee.

The tie between the brain and the smell is a strong one. So strong, that sometimes the brain can play tricks on the person, Bakhtari said.

“The memory of many days of seeing that drilling rig or smelling it will play into a person’s perceptions they can become hyper-sensitive to the smell, or sometimes they can smell it when there’s nothing there they see the rig and then smell things because the brain says there should be a smell,” Bakhtari said.

Colorado Odor Complaint

During Scentroid’s tests, they met with residents complaining about smells. They focused on ones that either didn’t register on the team’s equipment, or barely registered, he said.

“We’d stand with residents and they’d say ‘Don’t you smell it?’ And it would be hard to say no, but no, we didn’t,” he said.

During one meeting, Bakhtari said, the team’s equipment registered three odor units, far below the state’s seven-unit threshold for violations, but the woman said she was smelling a very intense, nasty odor.

“She said ‘Sometimes it’s even twice this strong,’ which would still just be a level six,” he said, still below the state’s threshold for violations.

Lessons Learned

Industries such as wastewater treatment plants, leather factories, pet food factories and others have tried to tackle the issue with varying levels of success, he said.

An initial scent wafting from an industrial operation may not cause much of a reaction in the brain. Then, over a short period of time, the brain often adjusts to smell and tune it out. This results in the individuals’ sensitivity to the scent going down.

But over a longer period of time, the brain might become overly sensitive to a certain smell.

“Your brain starts to get annoyed by the constant distraction and focuses on a smell and becomes sensitive. It’s the brain tuning itself to the smell,” Bakhtari said.

The location of the smell also is important, he said.

“People tend to complain about smells more at their homes than at their work. At home, they’re more defensive.”

November 8, 2017
Scentroid and NASA: New Official NASA Supplier!

NASA has awarded Scentroid a contract to provide Stainless Steel sample bags for use in the next MARS mission. Following protocol established in the 1970s, NASA is required to store and sterilize all samples transported back to earth, only to be opened in a quarantined and sealed room in order to protect against extra-terrestrial bacteria.

Scentroid’s stainless steel bags are being tested in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to be integrated along with an electron beam sterilization system for the transportation of rock samples back to earth. We are very excited to help keep the earth free of Martian bacteria.

For more information on our Stainless steel bags, click here!

March 30, 2017
What’s The Best Device to Monitor Ambient Air and Odour in Your Plant? Spoiler: It’s the OdoTracker!
Any air quality-monitoring program will involve a significant amount of resources. It is essential that resources are well spent, thus the correct selection of equipment and operational procedures is key. The results obtained must fulfil the original objective for the monitoring exercise.

Scentroid OdoTracker, a wearable multi-sensor device, measures concentrations of two chemicals in ambient air simultaneously. At the time of the order, the user specifies chemical compounds for measurement. For example, the user may specify the measurement of Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) in ppb level and Ammonia (NH3) in ppm-level. The device logs chemical measurements as well as the temperature and humidity of the sample. GPS location is also recorded, and data is automatically transferred to the user’s supplied Android device via Bluetooth.

Odotracker Components

Each Scentroid OdoTracker includes a sampling pump with an adjustable-rate, two chemical sensors that are specified at the time of ordering, Scentroid’s OdoTracker Application, and an Android tablet. For each sample location, Scentroid instantaneously records:
- The concentration of two chemical vapours in ppm or ppb depending on sensors ordered
- Measure Temperature and Humidity
- The record GPS position of each measurement
- Measure directly from ambient air
- Can record continuously for remote monitoring via Bluetooth
Increased Safety

Odotracker will provide the user with a consistent reading of the ambient air. This provides added protection from overexposure to chemical vapours such as hydrogen sulphide.

Measuring Odour Losses

Laboratories utilize the Odotracker to manage odour losses in sample transportation and storage. For example, H2S and NH3 readings after sampling and before olfactometric analysis. This will allow the laboratory to determine the level of odour losses and if the sample is still valid.

TR8 Odotracker Optional Controlling Module

Odotracker accommodates an optional controller module that has a 10 amp dry contact relay output to signal. This is handy if the summation of the combined scaled chemical readings exceeds a customer-specified threshold setting. Relay contacts are used to trigger alarms or switch on ventilation fans, chemical scrubbers or other devices when a combined scaled chemical concentration for the two sensors is reached. A hysteresis span is provided for relay triggering and non-triggering.

TR8 Odotracker Basics of Operation
- Connect to OdoTracker via Bluetooth
- Connect the sample bag and allow for ambient air gathering
- See chemical readings live
- Take snapshot readings of H2S, Ammonia, VOC, another chemical composition, GPS position, temperature, and humidity of the sample
- Activate recording for continuous data logging
- Export data for reporting and post analysis
OdoTracker can be used to record chemical vapours, along with the intelligent personal olfactometer SM100i to do odour concentration measurements. This provides simultaneous measurements on one Android device.

TR8 Odotracker Applications
- Measure ambient H2S, Ammonia, Total VOC, and other chemical concentrations
- Determine H2S, Ammonia, VOCs, and other chemicals emissions from various types of sources
- Determine emission trends through 24+ hour data logging
- Verify sample loss due to transportation
- Validate dispersion models through emission measurements
Click here for more info!
June 13, 2016
Amazon delivery may be years away, but Scentroid Drones are Ready to Go!

Amazon delivery may be years away, but Scentroid drones are already in the sky to take sample and analyze ambient air and monitor more than 50 chemicals .

The Scentroid DR1000 consists of a flying laboratory and a commercial drone. While in flight, five built-in chemical sensors can provide remote monitoring of chemicals selected at the time of ordering. The Scentroid DR1000 can be used to sample and analyze ambient air at heights of up to 150 meters above ground level that was previously impossible to accomplish. Air quality mapping, model verification, and analysis of potentially dangerous sites are all made possible! While in flight, five built-in chemical sensors can provide remote monitoring of chemicals selected at the time of ordering. It is often necessary to sample stacks, ponds, and other location where human access is difficult and/or dangerous. Furthermore, operator exposure to dangerous chemicals during sampling must be carefully considered.

The DR1000 Flying laboratory provides a robust platform to conduct impact assessment and air quality measurement for a wide range of applications including monitoring of: fugitive emission, flare emission, leak detection along oil pipe lines, landfill methane, odour emission and much more!

A thermal imaging camera can also be installed for visual confirmation of fugitive emissions in a variety of applications such as landfills, storage tanks, and oil/gas pipes.

June 13, 2016