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FRIPRO-Fri prosjektstøtte

Air Quality Monitoring Exploiting Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Antennas

Alternative title: Luftkvalitetsovervåkning med å Utnytte Massive Mulitple-Input - Multiple-Output Antenner

Awarded: NOK 12.3 mill.

Air pollution is a major global health crisis, responsible for an estimated 7 million deaths annually and severely impacting the health of millions more. Every minute, a child dies from an illness linked to air pollution, and ten adults lose their lives due to prolonged exposure to polluted air. Alarmingly, 92% of the world’s population lives in areas where air quality exceeds safe exposure limits. Despite this, air pollution monitoring remains limited across much of the globe. Current solutions rely on deploying millions of sensors over large areas, a costly approach that has not been widely implemented. This highlights the urgent need for innovative, scalable monitoring technologies. Our project seeks to address this need by pioneering a new air quality monitoring paradigm using 5G (and beyond) massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antennas. These antennas will be equipped with novel sensing materials designed to detect multiple pollutants simultaneously. By deploying customized nanomaterials on the antenna surfaces—each targeting a specific pollutant—using a Molecularly Imprinted Polymer layer atop a highly conductive 2D transduction material, we aim to add sensing capabilities to MIMO antennas without compromising their primary functions. This concept could also be extended to detect other environmental threats, including hazardous biochemical agents, airborne bacteria and viruses, and fluid-borne analytes. Massive MIMO is poised to become a standard feature in future cellular networks, with widespread deployment expected in the coming years. If successful, this project could enable large-scale, high-resolution air quality monitoring without the need for millions of standalone sensors, revolutionizing how air quality is tracked worldwide. Our interdisciplinary approach will generate significant advancements in knowledge, laying the theoretical foundation for MIMO-based air quality monitoring—an entirely new application. In the short term, this will open up new avenues for sensing technologies and inspire further research and innovation. In the long term, this project will influence the future design of MIMO antenna systems, integrating dual functionality with advanced sensing capabilities.

This project explores a new air quality monitoring paradigm utilizing the fifth generation (5G) massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna infrastructure to simultaneously sense multiple pollutants using novel sensing materials deployed on the antenna surfaces. The idea is to deploy case-tailored sensing nanomaterials on the antenna element surfaces with each targeting a specific analyte using a Molecular Imprinting Polymer (MIP) layer grown above a highly conductive 2D transduction nanomaterial layer. The MIP functionalized transduction nanomaterial over the antenna surface could act as tunable impedance with the impedance value determined by the presence of the target molecules. Sensing is done by monitoring the changes in the impedances between the antenna elements and the load termination in the adaptive impedance matching network. The proposed concept could enable massive MIMO antenna system with an additional sensing functionality without affecting its primary functionalities. By properly designing the physico-chemical composition of the sensing materials, the impedance can be made to respond in a specific way to target pollutants concentrations, which can be decoupled from other mismatch sources using machine learning techniques. The approach is applicable for any multi-antenna system where the antenna elements (same or all) can be functionalized to target a specific pollutant. The ambition is to create a new generation of dual functionality massive MIMO antenna system that is used not only for wireless operations, but also have a secondary functionality of multi-pollutant sensing. The concept can also be extended to apply for other environmental analytes such as hazardous chemical/biological agents, airborne bacteria and viruses as well as for fluidic analytes (utilizing microfluidics). If successful, the project will revolutionize air quality monitoring enabling a cost-effective sensing of multiple pollutants using massive MIMO antenna systems.

Publications from Cristin

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FRIPRO-Fri prosjektstøtte