Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC-2021)

IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21V66-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-2867-5

IoT Based Air Quality System

Asha Banu S.M 1 ,Sethu Venkatesh 2 ,Manoj Abishek David 3 ,Samuel Divine Star 4, Siddarth 5
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering,
Sri Krishna college of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore, India
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] [email protected]

recognition, detecting the error signals, noise reduction,

2021 Second International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC) | 978-1-6654-2867-5/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICESC51422.2021.9532626

Abstract— By This research work attempts to IoT based efficiency improvement etc.
pollution detection system by connecting the developed
system to the internet, where pollution from everywhere
II. RELAT ED WORKS
is detected. Air quality will be displayed on the LCD as
well as in the Webpage in PPM as it can be easily Harmful effects of Air pollution include allergic
detected. The designed air quality system is optimized reactions like irritation of the throat, eyes and nose as well
with an accurate result. This system is developed by
as some serious problems like bronchitis, pneumonia, heart
using Node MCU Microcontroller. The use of detector
has delivered stability features as a rapid response diseases, lung disease and asthma [1]. Primary pollutants
recovery. Air pollution is generally caused by the are main reason for air pollution and it is released into the
combination of fossil fuels with smoke and emissions atmosphere. Secondary pollutants are generally produced
from cars and trucks and other vehicles. The level of air when the primary pollutants reacted with other atmospheric
pollutions is increasing constantly and rapidly by the chemicals. Air quality affects public Health of humans as
increasing existence of industries, vehicles, etc. The well as animals [2]. In the past, the air quality sensors were
proposed system detects the air quality and displays it in
very large, importable and are expensive. Presently, most
the web page by using internet.
air pollution sensors has been developed on five most
common air pollutants such as nitrous oxide, ozone, carbon
Keywords— IOT, air quality system, harmful gases, monoxide, particulate matter and sulfur dioxide . In
PPM, gas sensors, node mcu, detector, controller.
today’s world, air quality monitoring are important as it has
rapid effect on human health [3].
I. INT RODUCT ION
The main objective of the proposed IOT based air quality This can be achieved by the usage of machine
system is that, the air pollution is growing as a harmful issue learning technique .The developed air quality sensor is
nowadays. The sensor used nowadays are not sufficient to
able to identify and observe the air pollution in nearby
detect the amount of co 2 in the air due to the high
concentration of co 2 (concentration up to 350 ppm) in air areas. It can be employed with the help of future
rather than other gases that the sensor detects. The co 2 is Technologies. These sensors is now became cheaper and
atmosphere because various health problems .and the inexpensive and it is also portable so that it poses the
important that to be noted is that the high concentration of ability to take it anywhere air quality sensors which can be
co 2 and certain pollutants in atmospheric air leads to
wearable Nowadays so the people who wear air quality is
death. At the same time the co 2 causes air pollution.
Nowadays air pollution is uncontrollable the amount of able to observe the air quality. This IOT device is based on
co 2 is in immense level in the atmospheric air. The air sensors that can detect the toxic gases that are present in
pollutants also causes health related problems like mild earth’s atmosphere such as home, industry and road where
allergic reaction such as irritation of throat, eyes, nose as high pollutants are present. The involuntary or Continuous
well as some serious problems. Like heart diseases,
pneumonia, lung and asthma. One of the major reason for Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations (CAAQMS)
the increase of co2 in air is urbanization and the road can display pollutants using different analyzers, thereby,
transportation. The sensor designed here will detect the reducing the chances of manual error, generate data at
amount of concentration of CO2 in ppm. time-intervals of minutes and are used for the transmission
Air quality sensors are used to detect the amount of of data to the accurate destinations [4].Wearable sensors
pollutant present in air. The data collected from these are also used for these specific applications and are used
sensors are used by IOT devices that contain sensors and for their relatively appreciable outcomes. Arduino
minicomputer processors. These IOT platforms are
execution is also established in the work.
influential in depicting the necessary information and the
contents that are to be neglected. These necessary data can be
used in variant scenarios like detection and pattern

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 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC-2021)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21V66-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-2867-5

B. Node MCU
III. PROPOSED SYSTEM NodeMCU is the one type of microcontroller that is similar
The entire work is a combination of hardware and to Arduino in most of the cases but it has one advantage that is
it has inbuilt Wi-Fi module in it so need for Wi-Fi___33
software platforms.
module which is very important for Iot applications. It is
Hardware  MQ 135 sensor. generally termed as ESP8266 Chip. This chip inexpensive and
Requirements contains all elements as a computer have such as RAM,
 NodeMCU Board. Network, and CPU etc. It has features such as the cost of this
 Buzzer board is inexpensive and its power consumption is Very low
compared to other boards. It has inbuilt Wi-Fi connection in it.
 Wires To activate the NodeMCU board it must be supplied to power
 Preset potentiometer supply either through USB cable or external power supply.
The processing power of this board is high due to its sleep
 LED monitoring features and inbuilt wifi connectivity it is much
more suitable for Iot based projects and applications.It has
 LCD display(16 x 2)
only one analog pin to read the data from the sensor.
 Resistors
 Bread board

Software  Arduino IDE software.

Requirements  MC programming Language:C

T able 1: Components required

A. MQ 135 Sensor
The sensor that we have used here is MQ135 sensor Fig 2 NodeMCU
generally called as air quality sensor. It detects gases such as
ammonia, alcohol, carbon dioxide etc. that are coming out C. Buzzer
from factory. The sensitivity of this sensor is Very high for This buzzer is powered by external power supply that is
NH3, smoke and other pollution causing gases . The cost of generally 3-5V.it has two pins positive and negative terminal.
this sensor is low and it is used for detecting wide variety of Buzzer is one of the indicators that indicate whether the air is
harmful gases. The MQ-135 sensors has four pins one pin is polluted. This buzzer is fixed with certain threshold values
used for power supply usually 5V is given and the next pin is that we are entering through program if it exceeds that
for ground and the remaining two pins are used to get digital threshold value it produces Beep sound otherwise is does not
output and analog output .we are using analog output and send produce beep sound. We are fixing that if the air pollution
it to microcontroller. value exceeds 250 the buzzer produces sound. It is portable
due to its compact size. The passive buzzer has been used.

Fig 1 Mq 135 Sensor

The sensor is operated for 24 hours to get accurate results.

The analog output is connected to microcontroller so that the
microcontroller checks whether the air is polluted or not. This
sensor generally detects the value in PPM.
Fig 3 Buzzer

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 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC-2021)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21V66-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-2867-5

D. LCD Display
The main use of LCD display here is to look at the output and
IV. WORKING METHODOLOGY
the brightness of the display is varied by varying the
potentiometer. If the resistance value increases brightness of Here we are using the Arduino IDE to write the program
the display decreases and vice versa. The name of this display for Air Quality system. To write the code for this IoT
(16*2) show that it have 16 columns and 2 rows. It is totally Based air quality system project the main objective is our
16 pins .the pins from 7 to 14 is called data pins that are added code has to connect the local area network by using the
in program. information provided in the code.

NODE
E. PRESET Potentiometer
MCU LED
MQ 135
SENSOR

BUZZER

POWER
SUPPLY
IOT
Fig 4 Potentiometer
WEBSITE

Preset potentiometer has three leads and can be easily

mounted on breadboard or perf board for quick prototyping.
We are using 10K Preset Potentiometer which has Three
terminals one is connected to power supply and other is LCD DISPLAY
connected to ground and the center pin is connected to display
through we can vary the display brightness.
It is also called as Trim pot. Fig 6 Block Diagram

In order to avoid problems of using Arduino Uno

microcontroller and Wi-Fi module which makes the circuit
F. Arduino Software complex we have used a different microcontroller NodeMCU
That has inbuilt Wi-Fi in it so no need for Wi-Fi module to
connect to the internet and it is also compact in size.
NodeMCU Board initially search for network that are
available near to it in the surroundings and once it find its
nearby network it connects to that network by using username
of network and password of the nearby network..

The username and password of the particular

network is given to Wi-Fi module through the code we have
written in Arduino ide platform. We are getting the data from
MQ135 sensor and send the data to the NodeMCU board.
Fig 5 Arduino Software
Before sending the data to the NODEMCU connect the
Arduino IDE software has a space write programs and it also Inbuilt-Wi-Fi to the network available in the surrounding by
have wide variety of boards .The software contains lot of tools providing the Wi-Fi name and password. By providing
necessary condition to the NodeMCU that is if the pollution
for programs. Before uploading the program we must check
whether it is running without any error or not. Here we used content is less than or equal to 130 ppm it will show
this software so that we can upload our code to NodeMCU “Normal”. If the pollution content is between 130 ppm and
250 ppm it will show “Medium”. if the pollution content is
board. NodeMCU board is not available at first we can select
the NodeMCU board and select the correct port for where the greater than or equal to 130 ppm it will show “Danger”. Then
NodeMCU is connected to laptop before uploading .The saved generating an Webpage in the name of IP address and upload
the data in the webpage so that it will be seen at any time by
program is stored in the laptop with extension .This software
also contains the serial monitor which function is similar to typing the IP address and the data will also been seen in the
LCD display which we have connected to our board. LCD display which is connected to NODEMCU. This system
uses NodeMCU to check the air quality. NodeMCU is ideal

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 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC-2021)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21V66-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-2867-5

for IOT projects because it has in-built Wi-Fi in it. This In addition to this, it also send it to webpage, where we
system has set to have high accuracy. We are taking input can monitor air quality by entering the IP address .We have
from the MQ135 sensor that we have used in this project and taken readings in PPM.
then it will transfer the data to NodeMCU board and the it will
generate the webpage in the name of IP address and it
transmits the data to webpage .As the data is not string type so
we can’t send directly before sending we have to convert the
data to string datatype so that the data is visible in webpage
.We can covert data to string by command String(Var_name).

V. EXPERIM ENTA L ANALYSIS AND RESULTS

The working of the MQ 135 sensor, you can just test

it by providing gas content near to it, I just used an alcohol
based sanitizer to test the working of the MQ 135 sensor. If
the pollution content is lesser than 130it will be considered
as normal. If the value is greater than 130 and lesser than
250, it is medium level, and if the value is greater than 250
it is considered as danger level. Fig 9 Quality checker

Finally the air quality is monitored according to pollution

content present in the air. If the air is more polluted then the
Persons in that area knew about and they take necessary
actions. This is given clearly in the above figure.

VI. CONCLUSION
The harmful contents present in the air are monitored
Fig 7 Experimental Set up by using the proposed IOT based air quality system and
IOT based air quality system involves both the hardware its performance is very efficient with simple design and
and software connections. The sensor detects the value and ease of application. This is inexpensive when compared
to previous systems. It is an IOT based NodeMCU board
send it to Node MCU and the node MCU check the
microcontroller based portable system. This system has
condition through the code and it send the data to LCD
high accuracy and it is also easy to use. This system is
display and serial monitor. cheap compared to other systems that are available in the
market.

VII. ADVANT AGES AND APPLICAT IONS

The various applications include road side pollution
monitoring system, data availability for users, low
maintenance cost, pollution monitoring in the industries, etc.
As this uses new technology, it is prominent in application
and available for multipurpose and for multiple scenarios.

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 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Electronics and Sustainable Communication Systems (ICESC-2021)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21V66-ART; ISBN: 978-1-6654-2867-5

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