11 Votes

Carbon Neutrality Tracking

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This project aims to provide aid to business owners to track their carbon emissions and their state in reaching carbon neutrality.

The product design of the project is divided into four sections: the carbon dioxide detector, the data transmission, the frontend development, and the backend development.

For the carbon dioxide detector, it shall be easy for anyone to deploy in a secure fashion, and the installation of this device is to be attached to the interior surface of the wall. The device measures the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air and the temperature. It includes a display to showcase the measured data, and a sound alarm to alert people when the concentration is too high. The main components are the sensor (MH-Z19), speaker, display, and Arduino. The overall design contains the measured data of both concentration and temperature will be shown on the display, gaps are created on the cover of the device for the soundwave of the alarm to travel through, and the power switch for the display.

For the data transmission, the IoT system signal collection intelligent gateway mainly collects the data and status information of carbon dioxide concentration and temperature sensors through the IoT system, and then transmits them to the OneNet IoT open platform through the Ethernet network. The MH-Z19 gas sensor communicates with the Arduino through the UART universal serial data bus. Arduino standardizes the protocol to the standard USB port and protocol and transmits data to the intelligent gateway, which then transmits the data to the OneNet IoT platform through Ethernet. Then the collection cycle, collection data format, collection data unit, access protocol, data format, etc. shall be set through the OneNet IoT platform configuring gateway settings.

For frontend development, a user interface is provided, and it consists of two main parts: user input and user status tracking. The user input will have the user to manually select the type of raw materials used and to enter the weight of raw material used. For user status tracking, the user will be able to see the analysis of the data collected.

The overall design proposed contains two sets of data, one is the data collected from the carbon dioxide detector device and the other is user input. The set of data collected from the carbon dioxide detector device is used to be analyzed. For example, in graphs like ppm vs days of a month, and the slope of the linear regression line can say a lot about the confidentiality in reaching carbon neutrality. Although the goal of carbon neutrality is to reach the state of net-zero emissions, which is not possible as of today, but reduction in carbon emission can result in carbon neutrality. Hence, if the slope of the line of best fit in such graphs is negative, then an increase to confident in carbon neutrality. And vice versa for positive slope in such graphs. Meanwhile, the set of data collected from the user input will be used to estimate the amount of carbon emission with formulated algorithms in the backend. The estimated carbon emissions will also be analyzed and used to add to the user’s confident in carbon neutrality. That is if the amount of raw material used is reduced or user changed the type material used to a material with lower emission. In the end, if confident level of carbon neutrality is increased to a certain level, then the user is consider to be in carbon neutral.

For backend development, which is also the security measures, salted hashing ensures the irreversibility of stored data and also prevents the rainbow table attack method. In this way, after the hacker gets the database, if he then wants to do the rainbow table by traversing all the commonly used password combinations, then he needs to hash all the commonly used passwords + salt values. And each user's salt value is different, so the cost is unacceptable, so this is a safer approach.

Targeted group are business and industry owners that want to keep track of their carbon emissions and carbon neutrality. Users can simply create an account on the platform, and can have the registered device placed anywhere as long as this device is being placed in a room that is associated with the user input data of the type of raw material and the amount of that material used.

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Inspiration

GHG emission is destroying mother earth, and it will take decades to recover even if the emission is stopped immediately which is definitely not possible for today’s society. Humans began to realize that actions have to be taken to avoid other devastating disasters. Therefore, some consensus for improving the situation was proposed like the Paris-Agreement, which states the world needs to achieve a balance between "anthropogenic emissions by sources" and "anthropogenic removal by sinks" of greenhouse gasses by the second half of this century. Countries all over the world are trying many methods to reduce their own carbon budgets. Some countries propose the carbon tax which is an environmental tax levied on fossil fuel producers or users, or directly on carbon dioxide or other GHG emissions. The carbon tax aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, reduce the demand for carbon energy usage, promote energy efficiency, and accelerate the development and utilization of clean energy. Also, some even put forward the concept of carbon credits with which the holders could emit the corresponding amount of GHG emissions. To evaluate the status of carbon neutrality and trends in certain areas, the design could monitor the carbon dioxide levels in these areas. It can also be used to verify whether the carbon dioxide level is sufficient to ensure the safety of residents in these areas. And the sensors could be programmed to alert people when the CO2 level reaches the unsafe threshold.

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