In our Environmental Engineering group at Unimore we mainly pursue the SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and we contribute to the SDG 13 (Climate Action) and the SDG 3 (Good health and well-being), besides the SDG 4 (Quality education). We currently are 11 people, whose half is focusing on atmospheric modelling and monitoring, mainly, not exclusively, in urban conditions: two PhD Students at SDC (Lilja Dahl and Arunik Baruah), one Post Doc (Giorgio Veratti), one research technician (Sara Fabbi) and two professors (Grazia Ghermandi, Alessandro Bigi).
Over the lasty ears we relied on compact sensors for distributed atmospheric monitoring,either at fixed sites or by mobile platforms, whose observations were coupled to urban scale dispersion modelling. We applied this approach in the European project TRAFAIR, where we coordinated the setup of both an atmospheric pollutant monitoring network (based on low-cost sensors) and of a urban scale pollutant dispersion model (based on open source models) in 6 EU cities.
This same approach was applied for Black Carbon aerosol, a climate forcing and cancerogenic aerosol fraction, which we mapped in 3 EU cities mainly thanks to funds from Unimore: in Modena, with the collaboration of our MS students in Env. Engineering (https://tinyurl.com/bcmodena),in Athens with a support from the EU project ATMO-ACCESS (https://tinyurl.com/bbactoath) and in Barcelona, with a support from the Spanish project CAIAC (https://tinyurl.com/caiacbcn).
We are using this information both to estimate the contribution by urban areas to the radiative forcing of aerosols and to improve the exposure assessment of the population to hazardous pollutants, in collaboration with the Environmental Epidemiology group at Unimore.
With this same research group, we are now involved in the MIRAI project (https://tinyurl.com/mirai-mo) for the estimate of the indoor risk of airborne infections in Unimore classrooms by continuous CO2 and aerosol/droplet monitoring.
We finally support local and International private companies in the environmental assessment of their products, as in the case of the atmospheric impact of the emissions by a Combined Cooling, Heat and Power Plant by CPL Concordia (http://cpl.it) as described in a study the Atmopsheric Pollution Research journal (https://doi.org/10.5094/APR.2015.042) or in case of a test in Frederiksberg (Denmark) of a TiO2-based photocatalytic asphalt within a joint effort between Unimore and Photoc at AS (http://photocat.dk) as shown in a recently published article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-022-02441-8).