Forward and Lateral Dual-Angle Optical Particle Counter Data Fusion to Detect Particle Mass Concentration

Abstract

The mass concentration of fine particles is often used as an important numerical index to evaluate regional ambient air quality. Compared with other measurement methods, light scattering method has many advantages, such as fast measurement speed, high precision, good repeatability, online and real-time non-contact measurement. Optical particle counter (OPC) can have better detection performance than other detection angles at a particular detection angle. The ideal OPC can not only detect particles without being affected by environmental changes, but also can invert the particle size value accurately. A simpler solution is to fuse the detection results of the forward and lateral photoelectric sensors to obtain a particle concentration value that is better than any single sensor. In this paper, a data fusion method is proposed which does not depend on the reliability of individual sensors, but generates optimal weight coefficients driven by empirical data. Field comparative experiments verify the effectiveness of this new dual-angle OPC fusion scheme. It has strong robustness in practical applications and can improve the performance of the sensor based on overcoming a variety of environmental disturbances.