Construction and validation of a low-cost system for indoor air quality measurements in livestock facilities

In recent years, there has been an increase in demand for food of ani-mal origin. The number of intensive production systems such as pig and poultry farming has been increasing more and more and exerting great impacts on the environment, due to a large amount of particulate material and gaseous pollutants that are generated within these facilities. Thus, low-cost devices emerge as a cheap alternative that provides farmers with information on indoor air quality in its facilities. However, it is important that these devices make precise and accu-rate measurements, providing reliable concentration readings. Therefore, the ob-jective of this study is the construction and validation of a low-cost system capa-ble of measuring, storing and sending, via the mobile network, the concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, carbon dioxide, PM2.5, PM10, temperature, and relative humidity. Preliminary inter-comparison tests showed that the built sys-tem had a reliable behavior in relation to all variables, even though the CO2 sen-sor was the one with the highest determination coefficient. The built device is able to provide continuous monitoring of atmospheric pollutants concentrations, at low cost and with simple handling.This study was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal) and FEDER under the PT2020 Program through financial support to CIMO (UID/AGR/00690/2013) and by the bilateral project established between the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (Portugal) and the Federal University of Technology – Paraná (Brazil).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio