Why Using Drone to do air monitoring?

As a practitioner in this field, our deepest experience, combined with our domestic and international applications, is that the application of enterprise drones in atmospheric environment monitoring can make up for the shortcomings and limitations of traditional monitoring methods and improve work efficiency. DJI Enterprise Drones are just a flying platform, but when used with gas detection pods and atmospheric data analysis software, they can do a lot for environmental Air Monitoring.

1. Daily environmental law enforcement: At present, environmental law enforcement officers in the investigation of corporate emissions, mostly door-to-door knocking inspection, rely on equipment is also a handheld gas detector, which is extremely inefficient. But when using drones equipped with a pollutant detector, pollutant inspections of a park can be completed in a very short time. At the same time, the use of visual data analysis software can get a real-time pollutant distribution grid map (as follows), and ground personnel can be based on the positioning of pollution sources in the map immediately after the door-to-door inspection, to enhance the targeting and real-time enforcement.

2. Spatial distribution of pollutants data collection: Whether it is fixed-point monitoring equipment or commonly used portable equipment, the collection of data on pollutants is on a plane. The use of an enterprise drone platform can precisely collect the spatial distribution of pollutants (the following figure). At present, universities at home and abroad have already cooperated with us to conduct research on the law of vertical distribution of pollutants, and the specific research results will be updated after the release.

It must be said that the use of DJI enterprise drones to do atmospheric environmental air monitoring detection pods in the design and production must take into account the impact of electromagnetic interference, airflow interference, etc. on the accuracy of the detection results, otherwise, the data obtained is very inaccurate or even unusable.

Specific to the technology, the sensor components of the monitoring module detection methods are mainly electrochemical detection (measuring SO2, CO, NO2, and other conventional gases), photoelectric particle detection (measuring VOCs, etc.), and laser scattering detection (measuring PM2.5, PM10, etc.). Unlike traditional handheld or fixed detection equipment, UAVs fly very fast, so there are high requirements for detection pods in terms of response speed and stability. Moreover, electrochemical detection is theoretically susceptible to many factors (e.g. humidity, cross-reactivity, air pressure, gas flow rate, electromagnetic interference, etc.). Therefore, the technical difficulties in circuit design and algorithm design are still relatively large. Simply put, it is relatively simple to make a basic detection device, but it is difficult to make it perfect and reliable, which is also considered a technical barrier.

Some respondents also mentioned that the UAV under the wash airflow for the detection results of interference. First of all, the impact of airflow on the reading of the detection module has two main aspects

The airflow may affect the air pressure around the detection probe, thus affecting the electrochemical reaction rate and readings.

Airflow may affect the temperature and humidity around the detection probe, thus affecting the electrochemical reaction rate and readings.

In terms of structural design, we use high-performance brushless air pump detection to draw the ambient gas into the air pump to ensure that the flow rate of the detected surrounding air is in a relatively stable state when the UAV is flying at different speeds.