Multidisciplinary Applications of Electronic Noses to Monitor Environment and Health (original) (raw)
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Exhaustive odour impact assessment should involve the evaluation of the impact of odours directly on citizens. For this purpose it might be useful to have an instrument capable of continuously monitoring ambient air quality, detecting the presence of odours and also recognizing its provenance. This paper discusses the laboratory and field tests conducted in order to evaluate the performances of a newly developed electronic nose, specific for the monitoring of environmental odours. The laboratory tests proved the instrument to be able to discriminate the different pure substances being tested, and to estimate the odour concentrations giving correlation indexes (R 2 ) of 0.99 and per cent errors below 15%. Finally, the experimental monitoring conducted on field, allowed to verify the effectiveness of this electronic nose for the continuous detection of odours in ambient air, proving its stability to variable atmospheric conditions and its capability to detect odour peaks.
Development of an Electronic Nose for Environmental Odour Monitoring
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Exhaustive odour impact assessment should involve the evaluation of the impact of odours directly on citizens. For this purpose it might be useful to have an instrument capable of continuously monitoring ambient air quality, detecting the presence of odours and also recognizing their provenance. This paper discusses the laboratory and field tests conducted in order to evaluate the performance of a new electronic nose, specifically developed for monitoring environmental odours. The laboratory tests proved the instrument was able to discriminate between the different pure substances being tested, and to estimate the odour concentrations giving correlation indexes (R 2 ) of 0.99 and errors below 15%. Finally, the experimental monitoring tests conducted in the field, allowed us to verify the effectiveness of this electronic nose for the continuous detection of odours in ambient air, proving its stability to variable atmospheric conditions and its capability to detect odour peaks.
Experimental Use Of Electronic Nose for Odour Detection
An electronic nose is an intelligent system for discrimination of odours and used to mimic the human nose of smell. Tin oxide semiconductor gas sensors are used for the development of electronic nose. It employs an array of chemical gas sensors, a sample handling system and a pattern recognition system. These techniques allow the system for a high degree of selectivity and reversibility. The ideal gas sensor has properties like reversibility, selectivity, robustness, sensitivity and reliability. After signal processing and feature extraction, a unique ‘smell print’ of the substance is obtained for classification, concentration measurement and to judge the quality. This paper describes the function of electronic nose, its applications and detecting the smell of particular volatile organic compound like benzene, acetone and ethanol at different concentrations. The obtained characteristics and response from electronic nose indicates that it can be used for distinct applications like pharmaceutics, defence and security industries.
New Technology in Sensing Odours: From Human to Artificial Noses
Floriculture, Ornamental and Plant Biotechnology: Advances and Topical Issues Vol. IV, 2006
The Human nose is much more complicated than other human senses like the ear and the eye. It is still the primary 'instrument' to assess the smell of various products. Sensory evaluation using the human sense of smell is subjective; careful design and rigorous training of assessors allows it to become a more objective, but still expensive option. Instrumental methods, such as gas chromatography/ mass spectrometry (GC/MS), are also expensive and require trained personnel. The concept of the electronic nose has attracted attention in many branches of industry for its potential in routine odour analysis. Being first reported in 1982 by Persaud and Dodds (Persaud 1982), the research in the field rapidly increased, and a number of companies have now been established to commercialize the concept. Basically, an electronic nose has the mammalian olfaction as a model and consists of a sensor array with partially overlapping selectivities and a pattern recognition system. It can be trained to detect and discriminate a large number of both simple and complex odours. The electronic nose concept is widely used as an analytical tool in industry today. The commercialization of the electronic nose began in 1993 as the concept became widely accepted as an effective instrument for detection and estimation of olfaction. This chapter describes the general setup of an electronic nose. It consists of an aroma extraction technique or air flow system which switches the reference air and the tested air; an array of chemical sensors which transform the aroma into electrical signals; an instrumentation and control system to measure the sensors signal and a pattern recognition system to identify and classify the aroma of the measured samples. This system has been used to identify several flower and plant aromas.
Odour discrimination with an electronic nose
Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical, 1992
Smell is probably the least understood and exploited of the principal human senses, yet it is clearly important to both product and process control in many industries, such as foodstuffs, beverages, tobacco and perfumery. Advances in the field of integrated microelectronic devices have led to new instruments, robots, capable of vision and complex touch or taction, but not yet of smell. This paper reviews the research effort that has been carried out at Warwick University over recent years into the development of an electronic instrument that can mimic the human sense of smell. The approach that we have adopted is to construct a microprocessor-controlled system comprising an array of solid-state chemical gas sensors (with overlapping partial sensitivities to odorants) and associated signal processing and pattern recognition. This electronic system' is based upon our present knowledge of the biological system. Our earliest electronic nose consisted of an array of only three to twelve tin dioxide thick-film sensors, yet it can discriminate betwe_en alcohols, beverages, tobacco blends and coffees. Current efforts are reported towards the fabrication of an integrated microsensor metal oxide array, the development of other electronic devices using polymeric materials, and the implementation of various patternrecognition techniques, including correlation, principalcomponent analysis, cluster analysis and artificial neural networks. Finally, the application areas most likely to arouse widespread interest in the next decade are discussed.
Electronic noses and their applications
1995
Electronic/artificial noses are being developed as systems for the automated detection and classification of odors, vapors, and gases. An electronic nose is generally composed of a chemical sensing system (e.g., sensor array or spectrometer) and a pattern recognition system (e.g., artificial neural network). We are developing electronic noses for the automated identification of volatile chemicals for environmental and medical applications. In this paper, we briefly describe an electronic nose, show some results from a prototype electronic nose, and discuss applications of electronic noses in the environmental, medical, and food industries.
Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2009
Artificial olfaction system (the so-called electronic nose) is a very promising tool to monitor the malodour in the field. Usual measurement techniques of odour use human olfaction or conventional analytical techniques. The first category represents the real odour perception but is not applicable to measure continuously bad odours in the field. The second class of techniques gives the mixture composition but not the global information representative of the odour perception. The e-nose has the potentialities to combine "the odour perception" and the "monitoring in the field". However to be able to reach that goal, the signal processing has to be adapted to work in complex environment. The research group in Arlon has more than ten years experience in the measure of environmental malodours in the field. The paper presents the minimal requirements that the group considers as essential for artificial olfaction system to become successful for this application.