Gerardo Vera
Research Assistant
University of Tulsa
Oklahoma, USA
Date of Presentation: May 9, 2024
Subject Areas: Impact of Emission Reduction Rules (Methane, GHG); Environmental Management Systems
Methane is an important greenhouse gas, second only to CO2. It is eighty times more powerful than CO2 but has a much shorter shelf life. This means that its concentration in the atmosphere can be reduced much faster. Methane is odorless and invisible to the naked eye, which makes detecting it particularly hard. However, the sensing technologies for detecting methane and other gases are continuously improving, as are the methods and systems intended for this purpose. One promising method is the wireless sensor network, which consists of several sensors deployed across an area of interest, continuously monitoring the concentration of a gas. These systems are already being tested. However, the cost of well-known sensors makes it prohibitive to be deployed on a large scale. We propose finding a low-cost sensor with a comparable performance to a “well-known” one. Then pair it with an atmospheric transport model to build an affordable and reliable network able to be deployed massively at a low cost. To do this, two things are required from the physics point of view. A low-cost sensor that has a comparable performance to a “well-known” one and an atmospheric transport model capable of working accurately with these sensors.