Higher education level laboratory for real time pollution monitoring

The present paper presents a higher education level laboratory for real time pollution monitoring used in environmental courses of the engineering universities. The main objective of this laboratory is to simulate usual applications in the field of real time measuring and monitoring of air and water pollutants. The laboratory was designed and realized by ECOSEN Ltd. Company. Real time simulators were obtained, using modules with solid state (SnO₂) gas sensors. A separate module is for pH measurements in water. For data acquisition a microcontroller or a parallel interface were used. An IBM compatible PC is used for data processing and management. Dedicated software was developed in Turbo Pascal 6.0 and Visual Basic 6.0 for data acquisition, processing and management. This laboratory is included, starting from year 2000, in the university course "Techniques of the environmental quality measurement" held at the Environmental Engineering Faculty of the Ecological University in Bucharest. An earlier simpler version is now used by University of Civil Engineering in Bucharest.