Air Quality: What limits are acceptable? - Particulate Matter Monitoring

[jakaba]

I have been monitoring the air quality inside one of our mining locations for the past 6 weeks with a rather simple setup using a Nova Fitness SDS 011 Sensor.
Little did I know when I started this experiment that I would have such trouble finding information about acceptable limits for crypto mining hardware.

We have Antminer S9 and Whatsminer M20S devices deployed there. I have not been able to find any information about safe values regarding particulate matter concentration. The specific miners are just examples. I am more interested which particulate matter limits would generally be considered excellent, good, or critical for computing devices such as miners.

Thus far I have only been able to find information regarding human health, but I am unsure how this would translate to mining-hardware longevity.

Monitoring results
The sensor is able to detect particulate matter concentration PM2.5 and PM10.
In the past 6 weeks PM2.5 was at an average at 2.60µg/m³ while PM10 was at an average of 4.24µg/m³.
A graph and a table showing the full monitoring data can be viewed here:
https://ibb.co/FJTyrR5


Any expert insights or links to useful resources would be greatly appreciated!

[kano]

A miner converts electricity into heat via powering electronic circuits.

The air particles will be what came into the building from outside.
Since they cycle a lot of air, then if the outside air quality, where you are is bad, so will the inside air quality.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Most often farms use filter walls to keep out the bugs & dirt while still having enough airflow - you want to keep the air velocity through the filters (and ducting if any is used) as low as possible to reduce frictional losses so that means you need huge filter surface area. In hot areas they very often use wet-filter walls where the filters are kept wet by sprayers or drip feeds. That of course makes them act as swamp coolers and substantially lowers the air temp coming through them.

[jakaba]

Yes of course is air quality inside is strongly related to outside air quality. Installing a filter system is definitely something we are planing for the future (when more high end miners are deployed). As for the moment we have to make it work without one. But even when we have a filter system I would like to be able to evaluate how good or bad it is working. Thats why I am monitoring air quality.

From my research data centers typically aim for particulate matter concentrations of less than 1µg/m³. I suppose similar thresholds should be applied for mining farms as well. This information can be found at section 3.1 in Table 2 in the following document: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.362.2554&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Contradicting to this Oliver from the WhatsMiner Support on Telegram (https://t.me/whatsminercommunity) has told me that WhatsMiner devices should be deployed in environments with particulate matter concentrations of < 0.5mg/m³, which would mean < 5000µg/m³.

A limit of 5000µg/m³ seems very high to me. But then again I am not an expert on the topic.