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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

So, you’re wondering. How do you measure the air flow through a room? Well, I have a variety of ideas that I can list here.

  • Use a video camera to monitor the flow of dust through the air, or inject some kind of known smoke tracer that you cana optically analyze the flow using a video camera. Easiest intuitively but most complicated/expensive to implement.

  • Use at least two air pressure sensors in a room. Intuitively, this should work similar to measuring temperature gradients by using two temperature sensors in a room: the difference in reading and their locations tells you the air flow speed. Unfortunately, the main problem this suffers from is that the air pressure sensors likely aren’t precise enough to get any viable air flow data.

Okay, so let’s see what other ideas are out there on the Internet. In general, there aren’t really great options for this, so it seems. Real-time continuous air-flow monitoring seems elusive. There, there are lots of ways to design a point-in-time air flow measuring device, but not much in the way of running such a setup 24 hours a day.

Also, for measuring air pressure difference between rooms. There is no easy way to do this. Again, the air pressure sensors aren’t precise enough for this particular measurement. What you have to end up doing is building a tube to connect the air in the two rooms and adding special sensor instrumentation in between. Yeah, way too complicated unless it is absolutely necessary to regulate that quantity as may be the case in industrial and medical environments.

20181124/DuckDuckGo sensors measure air flow through a room
20181124/https://www.sensorsone.com/how-to-measure-delta-change-in-pressure/