State of the Art Mobile Laboratory – the ´smogmobile´

Enviro Technology Services’ new Air Quality Monitoring Vehicle (the smogmobile) is the UK’s greenest and most sophisticated mobile air quality monitoring laboratory using state of the art, next generation battery-powered equipment in an electric van.

It creates no pollution or greenhouse gas emissions of any kind and so is able to measure key pollutants and greenhouse gases with extreme accuracy, both at static locations and on the move. It is also able to switch between monitoring outside air and air inside the driver’s cab.

It can be rented by the day and key applications include:

• measuring air quality along busy city streets, identifying pollution hotspots and testing the predictions of computer models that use information from static monitors.
• measuring air quality inside the vehicle where emissions can become concentrated, identifying the risk to drivers who regularly travel busy routes.
• Surveying landfill, fracking and other industrial sites to identify leakages of methane, a greenhouse gas which causes 86 times more warming than CO₂ over 20 years.

The mobile laboratory carries state-of-the-art instrumentation which is more sensitive, more accurate, and faster than the UK’s standard monitoring network, particularly regarding NO₂. It makes direct measurements in real time, using lasers, LEDs and sophisticated optical equipment.

It is mounted in a Nissan eNV-200 van powered solely by batteries with a 100-mile range between charges. The lightweight equipment runs on less than 300 Watts and is powered by lithium ion batteries, which provide up to nine hours’ operation and can be recharged within an hour.

It can measure:

• Pollutants with the most damaging health impacts: NO₂, particulates (PM₁₀, PM_2.5), and ozone. It can add equipment to measure ultrafine particles.
• The most significant greenhouse gases: CO₂ and Methane
• GPS locations –allowing air quality data to be mapped and identifying pollution hotspots
• Weather conditions affecting air pollution – wind speed and direction, temperature and pressure

Mobile laboratory equipment

• It makes highly accurate, direct measurements of NO₂ using an LED tuned to a set wavelength, in contrast to older generation, traditional monitors which measure NO₂ indirectly and are less accurate and unsuited to fast-changing environments. The Teledyne API T500 CAPS NO₂ analyser has a detection limit of 40 parts per trillion and a range of 0-1000 parts per billion.
• It measures mass concentrations of PM₁₀ and PM_2.5  in real time by laser scattering using a Met One ES642 Ambient Particulate Monitor, with a sensitivity of 0.001 mg per m³. Inside the driver’s cab other laser instruments are used to measure both mass or numbers of particulates per cm³.
• It can monitor low ranges of ozone by measuring the absorption of ultra-violet light, using a Teledyne API T400 O3 analyser, with a sensitivity of less than 1 part per billion.
• It uses tunable lasers to make simultaneous and highly accurate measurements of CO₂ and methane, correcting for water vapour, using an LGR ultraportable greenhouse gas analyser (UGGA).
• It gathers meteorological data including wind speed and direction, temperature, pressure and relative humidity using a Climatronics all-in-one sensor.

Further technical details of the smogmobile and its equipment are available on request.