MenuISSN (0970-2083)
ISSN (0970-2083)
S. Harinath* and Usha N Murthy
Civil Engineering Department, Bangalore University, Bangalore, India
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The ambient air quality survey was carried out at 12 monitoring stations with respect to SPM, SO2 and NOx. The pollutant concentrations were used to calculate the Air Quality Index. It is observed that most of the predicted pollutants are violating the permissible values.
Air quality index, Ambient air quality, Air monitoring.
The degradation of air quality is a major environmental problem that affects many urban and industrial sites and the surrounding regions. There certainly exists a close relation between poor air and poor health, as pollution of air results in breathing difficulties, increased incidence of Asthma, Cancer and even death. Heavy industrialization and increased transportation has polluted the atmospheric air to such an extent that it is slowly loosing it’s self cleaning capacity. Deteriorating air quality is posing serious threats, of changing, even the composition of atmosphere.
Indian metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, etc. have high emission of air pollutants, which is degrading the ambient air quality day by day. The degradation of air quality is a major environmental problem that affects many urban and industrial sites and the surrounding regions worldwide. Air pollution can reach levels, where it significantly influences human health, diminishes crop yield, and destroys infrastructure and patrimony. The phenomena involved in air pollution are complex. Once emitted into the atmosphere, primary pollutants are transported by wind, turbulence and diffusion, which can undergo chemical reaction, change phase and finally are removed from the atmosphere by dry and wet deposition.
Health and environmental impact of secondary pollutants, i.e., those formed in the atmosphere can be ore severe than their emitted precursor.
The Standards prescribed by C P C B (Central Pollution Control Board, India) has been tabulated in Table 1.
Table 1: Ambient air quality Indian standard (μg/m³)
The present study is carried in Bommasandra industrial, Jigane industrial and Electronic Industrial areas in Bangalore. Each industrial area is divided into three zones to select sampling stations.
Location of sampling points
The method of random sampling was adopted to collect air pollution samples at three stations in and around industrial areas of Bommasandra industrial area, Jigane industrial area and Electronic City Industrial area. The location of sampling station should be such that it should be in the free atmosphere, without interferences from stagnant spaces or large buildings etc.
The selected parameters are SPM, SO2, NOx and CO. The high volume air sampler is used to collect the air samples at each sampling stations as standards, for each different parameters and chosen samples were analysed in the laboratory by following standard methods during the period of Feb 2008 to June 2008.
Site Description
The Bangalore urban and rural parts are located in the south eastern part of Karnataka state between the North latitude 12º 15’ and 13º 31’ and East longitude 77º 41’ and 77º 59 ‘. The climate of the study area is seasonally dry tropical savannah with four Seasons. The dry Season with clear bright weather is from December to February. The summer Season from March to May is followed by the Southwest monsoon season from June to September, October and November Constitute the Post monsoon. The temperature ranges between 33º C in April to 14º C in January. The mean annual rainfall is 950 mm and number of rainy days is about 57, June to September is the principal rainy season.
Air Quality Management System (AQMS) is a strategy to overcome the problems of air pollution and is most effective towards continuous improvements of air quality. It includes the evaluation of various sets of emission control schedules to determine consequences to air quality and the formulation of alternative emission control schedules to meet air quality goals. In this paper the attempt has been made to collect data of air pollution at a number of stations industrial areas and then shown in the form of an Air
Quality Index
The air quality index (AQI) is calculated with the help of following equation concerning air quality rating with respect to each air quality rating parameters.
AQI = 1/4[SPM/SSPM + SO2 /S SO2 + NOx/ S NOx] x100
Where SPM, SO2 and NOx are observed values of air Quality parameters. SSPM, SSO2 and SNOx are Standard value of that very parameter recommended by CPCB. Based on the standard AQI values (Table 1), air quality categories of the observed air samples are compared and inferred.
Most of the sampling stations exceed the residential standard limits of 140 μg/m³ but within the range of 300 μg/m³ for commercial areas in 24 hours. It is found that SPM values were very high in all directions. The maximum SPM was found near the close periphery of the highway line, which is due to the addition of ground dust by the moment of vehicles due to poor maintenance of roads. Table 2 shows the values of air quality index in different areas.
Table 2: Rating of Air quality Index (AQI)
Table 3: Air Quality index at various sampling stations in the selected industrial areas.
The table shows that station1 and 3 is higher than station 2 in Bommasandra industrial area due to industrial activities, traffic moment and constructional activities. In Electronic city industrial area the values are very less compared to the other two industrial areas (Fig. 1), because of highway line effect and constructional activities.
Figure 1: Variation of Air Quality Index
The results of air quality monitoring indicates that the pollutants concentration were highly variable at different sampling stations depending on stationary and density of mobile pollution sources. Particulate matter exceeded the permissible standard values due to stone cutting and stone polishing industries etc. and automobile effect where the national highway is passing and due to constructional activities in the vicinity of industrial areas. The present study shows that the value of SPM is on the threshold limit where as the other parameters in the atmosphere of the study area is not creating any hard threat to the civic life. It is found that sournding people of study area suffered from respiratory and other health problems.
The present study clearly indicates that particulate matter is the major air pollutant in the study area. In the entire study area, particulate pollutants exceeded the permissible standards, but gaseous pollutants were within the permissible limits. The industrial activities and transportation activities are mainly responsible for the high pollution load in the ambient air of the area. The present study further suggests that public awareness can play a major role in planning and developing innovative ways to solve health, transport and related air pollution problems and the strategic plan for the their implementation.
The authors desire to express thanks to the authorities of Adhiyamaan collge of Engineering, Hosur, for their cooperatin during the work.
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