Recipient Organization
CREARE LLC
16 GREAT HOLLOW RD
HANOVER,NH 037553116
Performing Department
Engineering
Non Technical Summary
Monitoring Exposure Levels to Wildland Fire Pollutants is Critical. Exposure to vegetation fire smoke (VFS) products poses acute and chronic health hazards not only to first line responders and firefighters, but to communities located downwind of their source (Bytnerowicz et al. 2008). Current instrumentation capable of providing reliable air quality data is high-cost and impractical for direct use in the field. Emerging low-cost personal air quality monitors are limited in specificity and quality to effectively measure exposure to smoke generated by wildfires.AirQAST: Portable Automated Air Quality Monitoring. To address USDA's, the United States Fire Service's (USFS's), and the fire community's needs for online exposure measurements, Creare proposes to develop AirQAST - a multimodal Air Quality sensing unit for real-time data Acquisition Storage and Transmission. Our portable and low-weight system provides high-accuracy, high?reliability fire pollutant data, and is specifically designed for operation in extreme conditions. Using a unique modular system architecture, AirQAST integrates optical particle counters (OPCs), photoionization detectors (PIDs), nondispersive infrared sensors (NDIRs), and electrochemical sensors (ECs) in one device. The system transmits fire pollutant data in near-real-time via Bluetooth to approved mobile devices located in the vicinity. This creates an ideal scenario for fire managers to access the data and monitor firefighters' exposure levels. In addition, this data will help validate current emission models that rely on empirical assumptions. All data is stored, processed, and displayed via Creare's FireLiNK Application. In Phase I we will fabricate AirQAST's modular electronics and the accompanying FireLiNK user interface (UI); culminating with Carbon Monoxide (CO) measurements gathered in a prescribed burn carried out by our Northeast Fire and Forest Management (NE-FFM) collaborators. During Phase II, we will develop a wearable AirQAST prototype and acquire firefighter data in prescribed burns at key locations throughout the U.S.Excellent in-house expertise. Creare is uniquely positioned to develop and demonstrate this technology leveraging previously developed electronics which enable sensor data acquisition, storage, and wireless data transmission in the field. This technology is currently used by citizen scientists for water quality monitoring on a NOAA funded program. Furthermore, our FireLiNK app is based on Creare's WeatherCitizen software (https://weathercitizen.org), a smartphone-based app and server architecture designed to enable crowd-sourced collection of weather and environmental observations.Outstanding Team of Collaborators. To complement our in-house expertise, Creare has assembled an impressive team of external collaborators. Alphasense manufactures the highest-quality, highest-reliability, low-cost gas sensors currently available in the industry including sensors for CO, CO2, NO2, SO2, acrolein, benzene, ozone, and particulate matter (PM) detection. As part of this program, Alphasense will provide guidance in: a) sensor selection and calibration, b) sensor assembly and operations, and c) data correction, post-processing and filtering. Timothy Reinhardt, an expert in firefighter smoke exposure (Reinhardt et al. 2000, Reinhardt and Ottmar 2004) has expressed genuine interest in our development capabilities and will be joining our team as a consultant. Mr.Reinhardt will provide recommendations on the wearables design requirements, functionality and best concept of operations. Mr. Reinhardt has worked in the areas of air quality, human health risk assessment, and health, safety, and environmental compliance for over 30 years. We will also partner with veteran fire?service providers NE-FFM. NE-FFM's founder, Mr.Joel Carlson, who is a recognized expert in the fire community. As Prescribed Burn Boss Type2, Fire Manager, and Chief Fire Warner, he has led over 700 prescribed burns. Mr.Carlson will lead Phase I and Phase IIs prescribed burns, granting our equipment access to several burn sites. NE-FFM will also be our first end users and customers, introducing AirQAST's many operational advantages to the rest of the community. In addition, Creare is well qualified to lead the commercialization of this technology, as is evidenced by our DoD commercialization index that exceeds 90% of companies active in the SBIR program.Program Goals. During Phase I we will demonstrate the technical feasibility of our approach by fabricating a laboratory prototype version of AirQAST which will include (a) CO measurement, (b) data storage, and (c) communications. CO has been found to be a reasonably good surrogate for other pollutants close to the active fire (Reinhardt and Ottmar 2004, Adetona et al. 2011b, Reinhardt et al. 2000). In parallel, we will develop FireLiNK's UI for an intuitive user experience (UX). This will include all data access, post?processing, and visualization capabilities. Phase I will culminate with field testing during a prescribed fire carried out in the New England region by our Northeast Forest and Fire Management (NE-FFM) partners. During Phase II, we will fabricate a field prototype, with the ability to monitor additional pollutants, a rugged enclosure, optimized data storage and communications, and software enhancements for active data processing and viewing. Our NE?FFM partners will collaboratively work in burn sites at five other continental U.S. predefined locations including the West Coast, the South Atlantic States, and the Midwest.
Animal Health Component
45%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
10%
Applied
45%
Developmental
45%
Goals / Objectives
The overall goal of this project is to develop and demonstrate a comprehensive air quality monitoring system ready to use in operations by the fire community. The device is intended to be portable and relatively low-cost, yet highly accurate to support fire management, health, and science. The results of the Phase I work will provide all the required hardware, software, and firmware basis for a complete design to be implemented, built, and further tested in Phase II. In addition, we will identify the specific features of the prototype that need to be evaluated during Phase II so that we can design appropriate field studies. In Phase I, we will demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through the following technical objectives:Modify our existing low-cost, wireless electronics architecture to accommodate an air quality measurement sensor, such as a carbon monoxide sensor.Demonstrate automated sampling, storage, and wireless transmission of sensor-based air quality measurements. Evaluate equipment precision in laboratory conditions.Demonstrate operation in the field of stationary sensors located near a controlled burn.Demonstrate that the sensor's accuracy is sufficient to support needs of the air quality monitoring community in a prescribed burn.Develop an integrated product design for the Phase II prototype.
Project Methods
To address the Phase I technical objectives, work on this project has been organized into the following tasks: (1) Sensor Hardware Development, (2) Software Development, (3) Field Testing and Demonstration, and (4) Plan Phase II Design and Transition. We plan to complete all tasks within the eight-month schedule. The goals, efforts, and evaluation procedures within each task are further described below.Task 1. Sensor Hardware Development. The goal of this task is to design and prototype the AirQAST air quality assessment platform. Our baseline AirQAST Phase I platform will include a circuit board, a power supply, a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless communication and a microprocessor; all the required components that will enable testing. Circuit board fabrication, component integration, and initial testing will be performed by Creare. By the end of this task, we will have assembled an electronic system and configured it for the measurement of carbon monoxide concentration. The sensor unit and accompanying enclosure will be ready for laboratory testing.Task 2. Software Development. The goal of this task is to develop firmware for the sensor platform and the software to allow mobile devices to receive and display the acquired data; upload the data to the cloud; quality check and analyze the data; and download the data for off-line analysis. The result of this task is the FireLiNK mobile device app to receive and upload measurements, cloud-based software to share and download the measurements, and off-line analysis scripts for illustrating how to analyze the downloaded measurements. This task includes routine system input/output verification and validation procedures and other system checks.Task 3. Field Testing and Demonstration. The goal of this task is to bring together the hardware and software to demonstrate our ability to measure Carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations during a controlled burn. We will also assess FireLiNK's external device connectivity capabilities by acquiring data from a Kestrel DROP Fire Weather Monitor. Creare's WeatherCitizen app can already gather data from the Kestrel device. However, additional parameters like Heat Stress Index have not been collected in an actual wildland fire. The results of this task will be the definition of our calibration procedure and test protocol. We will also gather AirQAST deployment data during a wildland fire demonstrating the feasibility of our system to provide high-quality, accurate data. In addition, feedback on the system's deployment procedures and operational practicality will be collected. Our collected data will be stored in an organized format enabling simple access and understanding for assessment and potential model validation by the fire and scientific community.Task 4. Plan Phase II Design and Transition. In this task, we plan to complete a conceptual design of the Phase II system and define the PhaseII field test goals. The final design will be based on the design requirements defined during Task1 and Task 2, and will take into account specific features deemed useful during the field demonstration. In particular, we will determine the desired number of device sensors, the location of the sensors, the expected power consumption versus desired use cases, as well as data storage and transmission requirements. We will use our consultants' recommendations to design a wearable enclosure that is low?weight, comfortable, and operationally unobtrusive. As part of this task, we will define the number of AirQAST units to be developed during the Phase II, the number and location of study sites, the length of the collection period, any operational risks, as well as additional tools required to evaluate our system's performance. In addition, we will work with Alphasense and NE-FFM to identify a customer base and develop a commercialization plan.