Sezione Ospedaliera ITSSE Carlo Levi Torino

On Monday, 17 March, we had the chance to visit ARPA in Turin.

After a 20 min bus ride we reached the ARPA office, which is situated in the former Olympic village of Turin. The ARPA employees welcomed us very warmly.

Three engineers, each having a different professional focus, presented us not only a mobile station (which in fact looks like a caravan) but also gave us plenty of background information about air pollution, their work and answered all our questions with great pleasure.

Due to the many instruments inside, the mobile station it is not very spacious, that is why we were divided into two groups.

The caravan has a lot of different instruments to conduct the various measurements. We were quite surprised that it even needs an air conditioning because otherwise the instruments would get too hot. The caravans usually stay at one place for a whole month in order to examine air pollution. The tests run autonomously once everything was installed and the instruments were turned on. That is why it is not necessary to for a person to stay in the caravan.  We also got to know that air pollution varies according to the seasons, which is one reason why ARPA conducts measurements twice a year: in summer as well as in winter.

In order to determine the fine particulate matter in the air, filters are applied. Fine particulate matter is mainly created by fuel combustion in diesel engines whose exhaust gases contain the harmful particles. These filters are white in the beginning and depending on the amount of air pollution with particulate matter they turn grey, or, especially during winter, may become deeply black. We were shown filters which differed in their coloration (see picture). By imagining that we are breathing in these particles we were fairly worried.

Even from the outside the mobile stations are heavily equipped. On the roof there are, amongst others, sophisticated instruments for determining the weather conditions (wind, temperature, rainfall, pressure).

Thanks so much to ARPA for making school theory vivid and practical by creating a lot of “Aha!-effects”.

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