SENSIndoor finishing strong – final meeting in Saarbrücken

December 02, 2016

The project’s end in December 2016 around the corner, the SENSIndoor consortium met for its final meeting at Saarland University on 14-16 November, 2016. Coordinator Prof. Andreas Schütze was pleased to welcome the project partners, the project technical advisor Eberhard Seitz and the advisory board members Eduardo Fernandes and Mats Sándor.  

In the first part of the meeting, all partners provided a summary of their research activities over the past three years, reaching from the basic technologies and single components up to the system integration and field testing. The presentations reflected the partners’ achievements and their contribution towards the successful fulfilment of the project’s objectives in time and budget. “The incredible commitment of each partner and the highly professional cooperation between partners were essential to make this project a success and meet the project objectives”, Schütze said. The first part of the meeting ended with a review on market opportunities of the sensor technologies and the business plan which will be developed by the end of the project. This session reflected a number of application scenarios and demand by potential users. The competition of other Indoor Air Quality sensors remains a challenge, however, as long as it is impossible to recognise the quality of the sensors by the users. For this, standards for testing need to be defined to allow objective comparisons. SENSIndoor already has started in this direction by cooperating with the EMRP project KEY-VOCs (www.key-vocs.eu/).

The intention of the second part of the meeting was to share project results with the interested public and potential end users. Besides presentations about the achievements by the partners, poster sessions and demonstrations allowed for animated discussions between project partners and external guests. The reaction to the first field test results and lab-comparison experiments was very positive, as the partners could show that quantification of hazardous VOCs at ppb level could be achieved.

At the end of the meeting, all partners agreed that the fruitful cooperation should be continued and discussions about future cooperation have already started. “SENSIndoor has developed a sensor system with extremely high sensitivity and selectivity for hazardous VOCs. We are now at the point where exact requirements are needed to design systems that enable optimized ventilation systems adapted to specific application scenarios like offices, hospitals, schools or private homes”, concluded Schütze.

More detailed information on the meeting’s sessions can be found here.