Could the ioLight microscope deliver easy and low tech air pollution monitoring for the mass market?

As news broke early last week of the Volkswagen diesel scandal, tremors shook the entire motoring industry. Regulators felt acutely deceived. Engineers who had created a masterpiece in the common rail diesel engine and were disappointed that their professional creativity had been tweaked to provide what sounds like a rather dishonest solution to meeting testing standards. For loyal customers? Uncertainty about their own cars and responsibilities, and perhaps even a shadow over the automobile industry as a whole if, like dominoes, other manufacturers begin to admit their testing might have been rigged as well.

Many of us here at SH are inclined to think that Volkswagen makes some of the finest vehicles in the world. Such a severe fall from grace is a troubling prospect indeed, especially when one considers the alternatives circling overhead already – peddlers of pseudo science, governments who will take a chance to protect their own producers and, of course, the commercial competitors who don’t really “do” common rail and are no doubt rubbing their hands in glee at the current mess.

One snippet that popped up in the Financial Times on Saturday (and undoubtedly elsewhere) was that rival diesel manufacturers are using Urea as an additive to help break down the mono-nitrogen oxides (NOx) before it reaches the catalytic converter. Sarum had been closely following these various fuel additives as our pumps are increasingly being used to dispense them. Rivals had been increasingly baffled as to how VW were achieving their results without using AdBlue or other, similar Urea additives. Now we know!

Who knows where this will end? Experience tells us that in a world of spin, political expediency and commercial pressures, legislators don’t always do the right thing. Maybe we will see the death of the diesel engine in private cars. Then again, maybe we won’t…

Stand back and try to see the bigger picture (if indeed you can through the haze of air pollution that seems to be a permanent feature of mega-cities in the developing world). Pollutants take a lot of forms, and the diesel engine is far from the only culprit when it comes to particulates. We know that burning wood and coal give rise to particulates, and we also know that a move away from wood fire cooking stoves to charcoal and a stop to burning off vegetation after large-scale logging in South East Asia would have a material effect on air quality in a lot of areas. Nevertheless, if you focus on reducing particulates as being a health and quality of life issue, minimising diesels contribution to the fray is not a bad place to start.

Volkswagen Under Fire

Volkswagen Under Fire

A friend of Sarum Hydraulics who started his engineering career in the Research Centre in Big Oil some 35 years ago has always disliked diesels. He worried about carcinogenic white smoke when they started up. He fretted about soot particles laden with unburnt hydrocarbons and the nasty products of combustion even when at operating temperature. He still believes the same today as he did years ago and resolutely drives around in a Prius. Is he right? The common rail diesel may well be far more clean than old-tech “old smokers”, but isn’t there still a niggle on fine particulates that aren’t very good for human health? For quite a while there has also been an undercurrent of anxiety that modern common rails might be “good” when new, but do become relatively dirty after a bit of use and even worse if not serviced properly. They are an advanced technology. Going back six months, there was talk of banning diesel cars from the centres of some big cities. We now know that this anxiety was well founded.

Even if we end our love affair with common rail diesel passenger cars, where does that really leave us? The world can’t rumble along without big diesel engines in transport, construction, power generation, shipping and a myriad of other applications, and we know that truck manufacturers are struggling to meet standards on cleaner and cleaner diesels.

One of the virtues of the diesel engine (or at least the old smoker) was that it would “go on for ever”, suggesting the idea that throughout the developing world, immortal diesel engines will trundle on, belching out filth forever. The notion fills Sarum Hydraulics with dread. Is this a problem? It’s hard to say. We don’t have the figures, so can’t know the level of particulates from passenger cars, lorries, buses, fishing vessels, yachts, fairgrounds, construction or even ocean liners, but one can hazard a guess that if you looked at the figures in the cold light of day, they would be an eye-opener.

Of course, many of the major culprits are massive displacement diesel engines when compared with your small standard passenger cars. Even then, you would soon be drawn into arguing about the overwhelming number of sources of particulates that are wrecking health and quality of life whether it is diesels, burning wood, burning coal for power generation and so on.  Where do you start?

Maybe quick and easy air pollution monitoring using personal connected devices might be one line of attack. The Air Quality Management Resource Centre at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK knows more than most about the scale of the problem and doing something about it. Sarum Hydraulics was rather excited to hear that ioLight, the developer of the innovative pocket size wireless microscope had been exploring how the ioLight could be developed as a low cost and simple air pollution monitoring tool alongside Bristol’s Doctor Enda Hayes at the AQMRC. That sounds like our sort of nuts and bolts action.

Innovation like the mobile microscope from ioLight could be critical in measuring pollution levels.

Innovation like the mobile microscope from ioLight could be critical in measuring pollution levels.

Resign yourself to the inevitability that the VW affair will take up miles of newsprint and no end of bandwidth over the coming months. More importantly, will it change the quality of life for people who have to live and work in perpetual smog? Not in a hurry, we fear. Development of simple air quality monitoring using innovative optical microscopes like the ioLight and using the world class know-how of AQMRC might just be the lever that spurs consumers and governments to take drastic action on other fronts.

In the mean time, Sarum Hydraulics will carry on engineering its wonderful stainless steel hand pumps and sending them world wide. See what we do on www.sarum-hydraulics.co.uk

AQMRC are at http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/et/research/aqmrc

See the ioLight portable wireless microscope at http://iolight.co.uk/