A research project led by CE faculty Brandon Boor and Nusrat Jung which seeks to monitor and reduce indoor air pollutant exposures in classrooms has received $24,000 in funding from the U.S. EPA as part of the Agency's People, Prosperity, and the Planet (P3) Program. The funding will support the endeavors of the EPICS Global Air Quality Trekkers (GAQT) team. This program encourages student teams to develop the proposed project and Purdue’s Institute for a Sustainable Future helped prepare teams for submissions and helped identify strong faculty supporters.

GAQT will apply a service-learning framework through the Purdue EPICS program to develop, evaluate, and implement affordable solutions for classroom air quality monitoring. The project will support U.S. EPA P3 goals of assessing exposure to air pollutants in indoor environments where people spend the majority of their time. GAQT students will use cloud-based sensor data to evaluate temporal trends in indoor air pollutant concentrations and code data to a mass balance model to estimate indoor air pollutant source and loss rates. The team will follow the structured EPICS engineering design process with feedback from teachers and engineers to create modular portable air filtration units with different filter media to reduce student exposure to elevated concentrations of particulate matter (PM10, PM2.5, ultrafine particles), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon dioxide (CO2), ozone (O3), and airborne pathogens that can cause respiratory problems, headaches, nausea, and worsen asthma symptoms, thereby negatively affecting learning experiences in the classroom.

The expected outcome of the proposed project, titled "Implementation of Cost-Effective Techniques for the Monitoring & Reduction of Indoor Air Pollutant Exposures in Classroom Environments through a Service-Learning Framework," is a cost-effective framework for the monitoring and reduction of indoor air pollutants in K-12 classrooms through the tandem use of low-cost air quality sensors and portable air filtration units. The GAQT team will produce a robust multipollutant dataset across 20 classrooms that will inform temporal variations in indoor air pollutant sources and exposures before and after use of active air filtration. Indoor air pollution data will be shared with teachers and administrators in the form of monthly indoor air reports.