Electronic Noses and Olfaction 2000

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, 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. In 1994, the electronic nose manufacturer AlphaMOS in France initiated a symposium to promote the field and to bring together representatives from industries and the research field. The symposium has since been held annually, alternately in Europe and the USA. In 2000, the 7th symposium on the subject, called the International Symposium on Electronic Noses (ISOEN), was held at Brighton, UK, and this book, Electronic Noses and Olfaction 2000 , consists of a series of papers presented at this event. The 44 contributions contains a broad mixture of research and state-of-the-art papers, covering aspects such as new sensor concepts, instrumentation, data processing methods and a number of applications. In the first part, entitled Odours, Taste and Physio-Chemical interactions, an excellent overview of oral malodour is presented, including 60 references. This section also includes the description of a concept of an electronic tongue (yes, you can measure in aqueous solution with it), based on similar strategies as for the electronic nose. In the next section, Sensors/Instrumentation, various sensor principles are described, of which conducting polymer FET, amperometric devices and impedance spectroscopy can be mentioned. Sensor performance is affected by ageing and degradation of the sensor surface, causing drift effects. In the third part of the book, devoted to Data Processing, some methods to compensate for this drift are presented. Methods for sensor selection are also presented as well as data processing based on fuzzy logic and artificial neural nets. In the next two sections, Medical/Microbial and Applications: Food, Agricultural and Environmental, a large number of different applications are described, including microbial growth, quality measurements of olive oils, wheat and raw milk odour, search for truffles by a portable nose, monitoring hot flue gases, odour emissions in the field of agriculture and automotive trim materials. These five sections of the book cover well the current research and development areas of electronic noses. Especially valuable is the data processing part, dealing with new algorithms for signal processing and the algorithms for drift reduction, which is a new area with increasing importance. Also interesting is the application part dealing with microbial detection. A large section deals with quality estimation of olive oils - is this a trend? Contributions covering electronic noses based on new techniques such as ion mobility spectroscopy, mass spectroscopy or gas chromatography were not given, however, and sample handling procedures were only sparsely reported, techniques that also are important aspects of electronic nose technology. There were also no real industrial applications reported. The book is aimed at the researcher in the field as well as at instrument makers and people with a general interest in the subject, and it gives a good update on what happens in the area. Fredrik Winquist