Remote monitoring of landfill gases from solid waste landfill (including real time data integration to a web based data portal)

Abstract

The broad reaching implications of global warming throughout the world have placed the spotlight on gas sensing within the scientific and industrialised communities. Monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions is crucial for the management of potential risks to the environment and indeed to human health. It is widely accepted that a majority of these emissions are caused by human activities including the burning of fossil fuels. Less appreciated is the amount of emissions (methane and carbon dioxide) emitted from landfill sites despite ongoing efforts from the EU and EPA to regulate such emissions. Our efforts over the past 2 years have resulted in fully autonomous landfill gas analysers capable of performing analysis of gas samples for CO2 and CH4 at remote locations with a frequency of 4 measurements per day. Subsequently, the data is delivered in real time to a live sensor portal page where users can view key gas concentration levels from any web-enabled browser. The end-to-end nature of this sensing approach has allowed governing authorities to easily determine potential risks when compared to the current manual approach of sampling sites in rough terrain with an expensive hand held instrument. Moreover, the modularity of this design allows scope for easy adaptation to quantitatively measure other key sensing targets in multiple environments.