Environmental monitoring is extremely important to ensure a safe and wealthy life of both humans and artifacts. Monitoring requirements are extremely different depending on the environment, leading to ad hoc implementations that lack flexibility. This paper describes an implementation that can be adapted to many different applications and embeds the flexibi- lity required to be deployed and upgraded without the necessity of arranging complex infrastructures. The solution is based on small autonomous wireless sensor nodes, small wireless receivers connected to the Internet, and a cloud architecture which provides data storage and delivery to remote clients. The solution permits supervisors on-site not only to have an immediate idea of the current situation by using their smart-phones but also to monitor remote sites through the Internet. All measurements are redundantly stored at different concentration levels to guarantee a safe back-trace and to provide quality assurance also in case of network failure or unavailability. The sensing nodes have small impact, with dimensions which can be of less than 2.5 cm x 1.5 cm when the nodes have to acquire only temperature and relative humidity, and a low cost that enables using them in a set-and-forget way for intervals in excess of one year.

Researchers and governments are paid great interest concerning food safety and quality of food stuff. Determination of moisture and ash contents was accomplished by using simple, easy and low cost method to establish a database for agricultural commodities. Twenty four types of agricultural commodities were collected from the local market in Al-Rass governorate, Al-Qassim region, Saudi Arabia. The samples were collected in the period from the beginning of January 2017 to the end of July 2017. The survey show that higher values of moisture contents were found in tomato and cucumber (95.79 and 94.65%, respectively) while the higher values of ash content were found in leafy vegetables in particular spinach and watercress o

A wet chemical method was used to obtain tungsten oxide nanoparticles from tungsten tetrachloride and natural microfibrous inorganic clay (sepiolite) as a starting material. Precipitation of tungsten oxide species onto sepiolite under basic conditions and subsequent thermal treatment was investigated, prompted by the abundance of sepiolite in nature and the useful environmental applications that could be attained. Laser granulometry, X-ray diffraction, field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM) techniques were used to study the particle-size distribution, the morphology, and the composition of the prepared sample. Our findings show the presence of tungsten oxide nanoparticles, which are less than 50 nm, on the needles of the modified sepiolite.

ZnO tetrapods have been grown by an environmental microwave evaporation approach in air atmosphere without any use of organic solvents or precursors. The synthesized powder was characterized using X-ray diffractometry (XRD) and Field emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM). The grown ZnO tetrapods exhibited a noteworthy microstructure and phase formation of crystalline and pure structure. ZnO tetrapods were deposited on Pt electrode to be employed as ZnO tetrapods structure-based sensors, then, they were investigated at room temperature in the relative humidity ranging from 0.0 to 96.0%. The sensors have shown a significant response towards relative humidity starting from 30%. Cross-sensitivity was investigated with respect to N2O (150 ppm in helium) and methane (1000 ppm in helium). The ZnO tetrapods-based sensors were insensitive towards the interfering gases, indicating a potential applicability for humidity sensing purposes.