Review of Small Commercial Sensors for Indicative Monitoring of Ambient Gas

The traditional ambient gases monitor stations are expensive, big and of complex operation. So they are not suitable for a network of sensors that cover large areas. To cover large areas these traditional systems algorithms usually interpolates the measurements to calculate the gas concentrations in points far away of the physical sensors. Small commercial sensors represent a big opportunity for making sensor networks that monitor the ambient gases within large areas without the necessity of interpolation. There have been some successful previous works on these sensor networks with custom sensors and with commercial sensors but the information and characteristics of these sensors is difficult to compile and compare. In this work we review the literature on commercial sensors for ambient gas measurements over a hundred commercial sensors and compare their performance with the specifications of the European Directive on air quality 2008/50/EC.