AERŌTAPE®: a novel technology for real-time quantification and characterization of dust and its sources

EU Member states are allowed to subtract the PM10 contribution from natural sources (such as desert dust or sea salts) from the observations when verifying compliance with air quality standards. However, they must do so with pertinent data, which can be sometimes challenging. The recent EU Air Quality Directive enforces a drastic reduction of PM10 annual limit values (from 40 to 20µg/m3) and daily limit values (from 35 times above 50µg/m3 to 18 times above 45µg/m3) by 2030. These constraints will increase the need to apportion carefully natural and anthropogenic PM sources in the coarse fraction, with particular attention to traffic sites. In fact, the latter exhibit high PM concentrations and are exposed to various local (road traffic resuspension) and regional (long-range transported) dust sources.

AERŌTAPE®, a novel cost-effective instrument developed by Oberon Sciences (France), enables real-time (down to a few seconds), in-situ characterization of supermicron aerosols by integrating impaction-based aerosol sampling, onboard microscopy, and AI-driven image analysis. AERŌTAPE® produces high-resolution pictures with detailed single particle-resolved data, including number, size, shape, and color, enabling accurate information of supermicron aerosols (with no hypotheses on their shape or optical properties) and allowing to capture the dynamic of the various coarse PM sources. Compared to Optical Particle Counters (OPCs), AERŌTAPE® provides added value through (i) camera-based real-time counting, (ii) acquisition of geometric shape information, and (iii) color capture via RGB arrays. This enhances differentiation between particle types such as dust, pollen, and combustion ash, thus enabling a more accurate assessment of natural contributions to PM levels.

Field measurements at urban background sites in Cyprus (Eastern Mediterranean) allowed to demonstrate the instrument’s robustness (1-year continuous outdoor deployment), and its high precision and reproducibility against regulatory PM reference instruments (TEOM-FDMS and FIDAS), while providing useful additional high-time resolution information on aerosol properties. These results highlight the potential of AERŌTAPE® to deliver unattended stable and reliable measurements of coarse PM (PM2.5-10) together with a comprehensive single particle characterization, thereby supporting regulatory compliance, air quality management, and potentially improved source apportionment in response to increasingly stringent air quality standards.

Further field campaigns in Athens, Cairo, Beirut, Paris, and Abu Dhabi will provide region-specific samples for training and validating particle classification methods. These data will support the development of a robust PM dust database and enhance characterization of dust sources, including quantification of local versus regional contributions.

Funding:

This research is supported by the AERODUST project, funded by the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (grant agreement ANR 24 CE04 0814 01).

This research is supported by the Dust-DN project, funded by the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (grant agreement 101168425), and by the corresponding national agencies of the United Kingdom (UKRI) and Switzerland (SERI). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). Neither the European Union nor MSCA can be held responsible for them.