Indoor monitoring of heavy metals and NO2 using active monitoring by moss and Palmes diffusion tubes

Abstract Background Indoor pollution is a real threat to human health all over the world. Indoor pollution derives from indoor sources (e.g. smoking, gas stoves, coated furniture) as well as from outdoor sources (e.g. industries, vehicles). Long-term monitoring measurements in indoor environments are missing to a large extent due to a lack of simple to operate measuring devices. Mosses proved well as biomonitors in hundreds of studies. Nevertheless, indoor use has been extremely scarce. Therefore, this study aimed to determine indoor and outdoor pollution by active biomonitoring using moss as well as NO2 samplers to analyse outdoor and indoor levels of pollution. We exposed moss (Pleurozium schreberi) for 8 weeks indoors and outdoors in 20 households in the city of Girona, Spain. Al, Cr, Cu, Zn, Sn, Cd, Pb, Mo, and Sb were analysed by moss-samplers. Additionally, NO2 was measured with Palmes diffusion tubes. Results Compared to the pre-exposure analysis, concentrations of almost all elements both on indoor and outdoor mosses increased. Except for Cd, all metals and NO2 had, on average, higher concentrations in outdoor mosses than at corresponding indoor sites. However, some 20% of the samples showed inverse patterns, thus, indicating both indoor and outdoor sources. Indoor/outdoor correlations of elements were not significant, but highest for markers of traffic-related pollution, such as Sn, Sb, and NO2. The wide range of indoor–outdoor ratios of NO2 exemplified the relevance of indoor sources such as smoking or gas cooking. Though mostly excluded in this study, a few sites had these sources present. Conclusions The study at hand showed that moss exposed at indoor sites could be a promising tool for long-time biomonitoring. However, it had also identified some drawbacks that should be considered in future indoor studies. Increments of pollutants were sometimes really low compared to the initial concentration and therefore not detectable. This fact hampers the investigation of elements with low basic element levels as, e.g. Pt. Therefore, moss with real low basic levels is needed for active monitoring, especially for future studies in indoor monitoring. Cloned material could be a proper material for indoor monitoring yet never was tested for this purpose.

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USING OPENSTREETMAP DATA TO GENERATE BUILDING MODELS WITH THEIR INNER STRUCTURES FOR 3D MAPS

ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ◽

10.5194/isprs-annals-iv-2-w4-411-2017 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol IV-2/W4 ◽

pp. 411-416 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Z. Wang ◽

A. Zipf

Keyword(s):

Urban Planning ◽

Web Application ◽

Incident Management ◽

Indoor Environments ◽

Building Structures ◽

Building Models ◽

Wide Range ◽

Building Information ◽

Building Components ◽

Indoor And Outdoor

With the development of Web 2.0, more and more data related to indoor environments has been collected within the volunteered geographic information (VGI) framework, which creates a need for construction of indoor environments from VGI. In this study, we focus on generating 3D building models from OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, and provide an approach to support construction and visualization of indoor environments on 3D maps. In this paper, we present an algorithm which can extract building information from OSM data, and can construct building structures as well as inner building components (e.g., doors, rooms, and windows). A web application is built to support the processing and visualization of the building models on a 3D map. We test our approach with an indoor dataset collected from the field. The results show the feasibility of our approach and its potentials to provide support for a wide range of applications, such as indoor and outdoor navigation, urban planning, and incident management.

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Gas Chromatographic/Mass Spectrometric Determination of Benzene and Its Alkyl Derivatives in Indoor and Outdoor Air in Fuji, Japan

Journal of AOAC International ◽

10.1093/jaoac/85.1.203 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 85 (1) ◽

pp. 203-211 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Takashi Amagai ◽

Takeshi Ohura ◽

Tomohiko Sugiyama ◽

Masahiro Fusaya ◽

Hidetsuru Matsushita

Keyword(s):

Mass Spectrometric ◽

Benzene Derivatives ◽

Outdoor Air ◽

Indoor Pollution ◽

Indoor Sources ◽

Alkyl Derivatives ◽

Concentration Levels ◽

Indoor And Outdoor ◽

Chromatographic Mass

Abstract An analytical method was established for the determination of benzene and 13 of its alkyl derivatives. The method was applied to a survey of indoor pollution that investigated the usefulness of the method, concentration levels, seasonal variations, profiles, correlations between compounds, and factors that affected indoor pollution by these compounds. The survey was performed in 21 houses in the summer of 1999 and 20 houses in the winter of 1999–2000 in Fuji, Japan. All the target compounds were detected in the indoor and outdoor air of all houses. Outdoor concentrations of benzene ranged from 0.779 to 3.17 μg/m3 in summer and from 1.35 to 6.04 μg/m3 in winter, whereas indoor concentrations of benzene ranged from 0.694 to 3.11 μg/m3 in summer and from 1.65 to 6.89 μg/m3 in winter. Indoor concentrations of the target compounds, except for benzene, were elevated, compared with outdoor concentrations. Because indoor and outdoor concentrations of benzene and its derivatives in summer were lower than in winter, the emission of these compounds may be increased by use of a heater and other variables present in winter. Profiles of the compounds, correlations between the compounds, and factors that affected indoor pollution (determined by multiple regression analysis) were investigated. These results suggested that indoor benzene predominantly penetrated from outdoors and that other benzene derivatives were emitted from indoor sources, such as paint solvents and kerosene heaters.

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Assessment of Indoor Benzene and Its Alkyl Derivatives Concentrations in Offices Belonging to University of Technology (Poland)

Atmosphere ◽

10.3390/atmos12010051 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 51

Author(s):

Barbara Kozielska ◽

Dorota Kaleta

Keyword(s):

Dominant Role ◽

Average Concentration ◽

Air Contamination ◽

Flame Ionization ◽

Indoor Sources ◽

Alkyl Derivatives ◽

University Of Technology ◽

Low Concentrations ◽

Office Rooms ◽

Indoor And Outdoor

Indoor air contamination in office rooms is regarded as one of the most important issues in the protection of workers’ health, because contaminants, even those occurring at low concentrations, can cause health problems for the office staff in view of the long exposure time. This paper presents the results of measurements of benzene and its alkyl derivatives (toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes, styrene, and 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene)—known indicators of human exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air in newly renovated offices at University of Technology (Upper Silesia, Poland). Monthly samples of indoor and outdoor air were collected during the years 2018–2019 by passive methods and analyzed by thermal desorption-gas chromatography with flame ionization detector (TD-GC/FID). In the first month of measurements average concentrations of the sum of five VOCs under consideration was 127.7 µg/m3, then in subsequent months between 15.1 µg/m3 to 87.3 µg/m3. The average concentration of carcinogenic benzene was below 1.5 μg/m3. Toluene had the highest concentration among studied VOCs, accounting for as high as 60% and 84% of the total indoor and outdoor VOCs, respectively. High indoor-to-outdoor (I/O) ratios for ethylbenzene (7.1), m,p-xylene (9.8), and styrene (12.5) indicate the dominant role of indoor sources.

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A Visual and VAE Based Hierarchical Indoor Localization Method

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21103406 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (10) ◽

pp. 3406

Author(s):

Jie Jiang ◽

Yin Zou ◽

Lidong Chen ◽

Yujie Fang

Keyword(s):

Image Retrieval ◽

Indoor Localization ◽

Data Sets ◽

Indoor Environments ◽

Global Features ◽

Data Set ◽

Data Annotation ◽

Wide Range ◽

Annotation Costs ◽

Global And Local

Precise localization and pose estimation in indoor environments are commonly employed in a wide range of applications, including robotics, augmented reality, and navigation and positioning services. Such applications can be solved via visual-based localization using a pre-built 3D model. The increase in searching space associated with large scenes can be overcome by retrieving images in advance and subsequently estimating the pose. The majority of current deep learning-based image retrieval methods require labeled data, which increase data annotation costs and complicate the acquisition of data. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised hierarchical indoor localization framework that integrates an unsupervised network variational autoencoder (VAE) with a visual-based Structure-from-Motion (SfM) approach in order to extract global and local features. During the localization process, global features are applied for the image retrieval at the level of the scene map in order to obtain candidate images, and are subsequently used to estimate the pose from 2D-3D matches between query and candidate images. RGB images only are used as the input of the proposed localization system, which is both convenient and challenging. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method can localize images within 0.16 m and 4° in the 7-Scenes data sets and 32.8% within 5 m and 20° in the Baidu data set. Furthermore, our proposed method achieves a higher precision compared to advanced methods.

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RFID

International Journal of Applied Logistics ◽

10.4018/jal.2012040102 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 14-24 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Antti Permala ◽

Karri Rantasila ◽

Eetu Pilli-Sihvola

Keyword(s):

Manufacturing Industry ◽

Cost Savings ◽

Basic Element ◽

Automated Identification ◽

Efficient Management ◽

Industrial Sectors ◽

Wide Range ◽

Closed Systems ◽

Identification Techniques

In many industrial sectors, the use of RFID in closed systems is evolving. To be implemented in global supply chains, all aspects related to RFID need to be standardised. By collecting, processing and distributing information efficiently, organisations should be able to improve the efficiency of their transport logistics processes, lower their operational costs, and improve their portfolio of logistics services. This case study describes the current perspectives, challenges and benefits of RFID applications in manufacturing industry. Automated, remote and wireless identification is a basic element in implementing efficient management systems in the supply chain. The most important identification techniques are barcode and RFID. Barcode is currently the most widely used method for the identification of parcels, but RFID is more suitable for automated identification for many different reasons including better readability and enhanced environmental durability. By reducing manual work and errors, RFID generates cost savings, increased productivity and efficiency of processes. There is a wide range of different RFID technologies that have varying reading ranges, protocols and data contents. There are two different approaches to using RFID tags and numbering the items to be identified. Recent standardisation developments have started to resolve the interoperability problems in the field of RFID identification.

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The effects of indoor and outdoor air pollutants on workers’ productivity in office building

E3S Web of Conferences ◽

10.1051/e3sconf/201911102057 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 111 ◽

pp. 02057 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Cristina Becchio ◽

Marta Carla Bottero ◽

Stefano Paolo Corgnati ◽

Federico Dell’Anna ◽

Valentina Fabi ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Cost Benefit Analysis ◽

Cost Benefit ◽

Point Of View ◽

Office Building ◽

Indoor Environmental Quality ◽

Indoor Sources ◽

Sources Of Pollution ◽

Absence From Work ◽

The Cost ◽

Indoor And Outdoor

In the present-day society, people spend about 80% of their time inside buildings, and specifically 30-40% in workplaces. From this evidence, the indoor environmental quality needs to be investigated, and in particular, the possible sources of indoor-outdoor pollutants and their impact on the human health, comfort and productivity. First, through an examination of the indoor sources of pollution, the research analysed the main substances that affect indoor air quality in an office. Second, the pollution of external origin and its effects on the performance of employees were taken into consideration. Two scenarios were designed for a Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning (HVAC) system in an office building; one by the installation of a biocidal filter and the other by a traditional one. Two methods were applied to evaluate and compare those scenarios; the Cost Benefit Analysis and the Monte Carlo Simulation. From a financial point of view, the investment and management costs of the filters were considered. Instead, the annual benefits included increasing productivity and reducing days of absence from work due to illness. The results confirmed the energy and socio-economic efficiency of the antibacterial filter; it can be considered a solution to achieve the best income.

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Isolation of Toxigenic NocardiopsisStrains from Indoor Environments and Description of Two NewNocardiopsis Species, N. exhalans sp. nov. andN. umidischolae sp. nov

Applied and Environmental Microbiology ◽

10.1128/aem.67.9.4293-4304.2001 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 67 (9) ◽

pp. 4293-4304 ◽

Cited By ~ 46

Author(s):

Joanna S. P. Peltola ◽

Maria A. Andersson ◽

Peter Kämpfer ◽

Georg Auling ◽

Reiner M. Kroppenstedt ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Novel Species ◽

Dry Weight ◽

Good Survival ◽

Indoor Environments ◽

Toxic Substances ◽

Potential Hazard ◽

Wide Range ◽

Membrane Barrier ◽

Boar Spermatozoa ◽

Physiological Characters

ABSTRACT Nocardiopsis strains were isolated from water-damaged indoor environments. Two strains (N. alba subsp.alba 704a and a strain representing a novel species, ES10.1) as well as strains of N. prasina, N. lucentensis,and N. tropica produced methanol-soluble toxins that paralyzed the motility of boar spermatozoa at <30 μg of crude extract (dry weight) ml−1. N. prasina, N. lucentensis, N. tropica, and strain ES10.1 caused cessation of motility by dissipating the mitochondrial membrane potential, Δψ, of the boar spermatozoa. Indoor strain 704a produced a substance that destroyed cell membrane barrier function and depleted the sperm cells of ATP. Indoor strain 64/93 was antagonistic towardsCorynebacterium renale. Two indoor Nocardiopsisstrains were xerotolerant, and all five utilized a wide range of substrates. This combined with the production of toxic substances suggests good survival and potential hazard to human health in water-damaged indoor environments. Two new species, Nocardiopsis exhalans sp. nov. (ES10.1T) and Nocardiopsis umidischolae sp. nov. (66/93T), are proposed based on morphology, chemotaxonomic and physiological characters, phylogenetic analysis, and DNA-DNA reassociations.

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Evaluation of Particulate Matter Pollution in Micro-Environments of Office Buildings—A Case Study of Delhi, India

10.5772/intechopen.95445 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Saurabh Mendiratta ◽

Sunil Gulia ◽

Prachi Goyal ◽

Sanjeev Kumar Goyal

Keyword(s):

Particulate Matter ◽

Ultrafine Particles ◽

Work Performance ◽

Indoor Air Pollution ◽

Management Practices ◽

Office Buildings ◽

Indoor Environments ◽

Air Pollution Control ◽

Indoor Sources ◽

High Level

High level of particulate matter in an office building is one of the prime concerns for occupant’s health and their work performance. The present study focuses on the evaluation of the distribution pattern of airborne particles in three office buildings in Delhi City. The study includes the Assessment of PM10, PM2.5 and PM1 in the different indoor environments, their particle size distribution, I/O ratio, a correlation between pollutants their sources and management practices. The features of buildings I, II, and III are old infrastructure, new modern infrastructure, and an old building with good maintenance. The results indicate that the average concentrations of PM10, PM2.5, and PM1 are found in the range of 55–150 μg m−3, 41–104 μg m−3 and 37–95 μg m−3, respectively in Building I, 33–136 μg m−3, 30–84 μg m−3 and 28–73 μg m−3, respectively in Building II and 216–330 μg m−3, 188–268 μg m−3 and 171–237 μg m−3, respectively in Building III. The maximum proportion of the total mass contributed by PM0.25–1.0 i.e., up to 75%, 86%, and 76% in the meeting room of Building I, II and III, respectively. The proportion of ultrafine particles was found higher in the office area where the movement was minimum and vice versa. The higher I/O indicates the contribution of the presence of indoor sources for ultra-fine and finer particles. Further, possible strategies for indoor air pollution control are also discussed.

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STRUCTURE OF EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION

Information Technologies and Learning Tools ◽

10.33407/itlt.v3i2.265 ◽

1970 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Semen M. Tolkunov

Keyword(s):

Distance Education ◽

Educational Software ◽

Intelligent Tutoring ◽

Intelligent Tutoring System ◽

Basic Element ◽

Tutoring System ◽

Basic Principles ◽

Wide Range

In the article author describes the basic principles and approaches for developing of educational software in context of distance education. Basic element of software is intelligent tutoring system, which provides wide range of possibilities for personalizing and differentiation of education.

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Exposure to Particles and Gases in a Shopping Mall: Spatial Heterogeneity and Outdoor Infiltration

Atmosphere ◽

10.3390/atmos12101313 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (10) ◽

pp. 1313

Author(s):

Alison Tan Yui Li ◽

Wenwei Che ◽

Yushan Song ◽

Jimmy Chun Kung Tong ◽

Alexis Kai Hon Lau

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Air Quality ◽

Spatial Heterogeneity ◽

Indoor Air ◽

Sampling Methods ◽

Shopping Mall ◽

Shopping Malls ◽

Indoor Sources ◽

Building Geometry ◽

Indoor And Outdoor

Shopping malls in Hong Kong are usually located near major roads. Indoor air quality (IAQ) in these buildings is subject to infiltration of outdoor traffic-related pollutants, such as PM10, PM2.5, CO, and NO2. Furthermore, the existence of indoor sources and building geometry added to the complexity of variations in IAQ. To understand outdoor infiltration and spatial heterogeneity of these pollutants, we conducted fixed and cruise indoor sampling, together with simultaneous outdoor measurements, in a typical mall in Hong Kong. The cruise sampling was conducted indoors on a predesigned route and repeated 15 times. Outdoor infiltration was quantified based on regression analysis between indoor and outdoor sampling. Results showed that 75% of PM2.5, 53% of PM10, and 59% of NO2 were infiltrated into the mall during opening hours. Elevated PM2.5 and CO were observed during the dinner period, suggesting an impact from cooking. Substantial spatial variations were observed for PM10, PM2.5, and NO2, particularly at locations near entrances and restaurants. Measures are needed to reduce pollution intrusion from building openings and cooking-related sources to improve air quality in the selected mall. Fixed and cruise sampling methods used in this study provide insights on sensor deployment for future air quality monitoring in buildings.

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