Measuring Methane Emissions in Ambient Air with a Low-Cost, Portable Sensor System: Focus on Scalability and Transferability of the Model

Landfills represent a significant source of methane emissions, with important environmental, climatic and safety impacts due to the widespread and variable nature of these emissions. Traditional monitoring methods, such as flow chambers coupled with flame ionisation detectors (FIDs), provide high accuracy but are limited in terms of spatial representativeness, operational flexibility and cost, especially during large-scale or continuous monitoring campaigns. Within this context, the European ESCAPE project aims to develop a low-cost, portable and modular platform for the detection and quantification of low methane concentrations in ambient air at complex environmental sites. The system is based on commercial MOX and NDIR sensors integrated into portable toolboxes equipped with dedicated chambers, regulated suction systems and autonomous data acquisition units with real-time transmission. This work describes the development and testing of two identical toolboxes to assess system reproducibility and the transferability of predictive models between devices. Laboratory and field tests were carried out under controlled and real landfill conditions, with comparisons against portable FID measurements. Results showed good agreement between predicted methane concentrations and reference data, with correlation indexes up to 0.77. Moreover, transferring the machine learning model between toolboxes did not produce statistically significant performance reductions, demonstrating promising robustness and generalizability of the proposed calibration strategy.