UBC Engineering deploys mobile air pollution laboratory

The PLUME van has officially hit the road in Vancouver! PLUME, which stands for Portable Laboratory for Understanding Human-Made Emissions was developed by Dr. Naomi Zimmerman, a professor of Mechanical Engineering who studies air quality and its impacts on health and the environment.

The “air pollution lab on wheels” will be used to measure concentrations of air pollutants across the city including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ground-level ozone, black carbon, methane, volatile organic compounds, and various sizes of ultrafine particles that can affect air quality.

Read the full story: https://apsc.ubc.ca/news/2022/ubc-eng...

Dr. Zimmerman's team at IREACH lab will use air quality data collected by the van to build a map of the city, showing how levels of pollution components change over time.

“Using a mobile laboratory rather than fixed air quality sensors means we can cover a greater distance,” says Zimmerman. “We can sample anywhere from highways, to by the ocean, to the middle of a field with the same instrumentation in a single day. The instruments in the van can collect data as often as every second.”

PLUME is already being used to collect information on unpleasant smells in Metro Vancouver. Called Smell Vancouver, the project and its associated web app is as part of a larger effort to understand air quality and its implications for environmental injustice in the region.

Zimmerman cites research that links breathing polluted air to numerous health problems, and notes that air pollution is linked to an estimated nine million premature deaths per year worldwide.

“Our most socially and materially deprived communities are frequently exposed to disproportionate levels of air pollution and it’s important to understand their experience of air quality. Odours are important as well—cannabis odours, industrial odours, chemical odours and other unpleasant smells. Are the same communities struggling from odours also suffering air pollution?”

Ultimately the team hopes to start drawing links between air pollutants and odour.

Some video courtesy of the following artists on Pexels: Tom Fisk, Antoni Shkraba, Kelly, Dmitry Varennikov and Kevin Rigney

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