Electronic Noses and Applications

Electronic noses are customized devices employed to detect and to identify gaseous mixtures, even to give the concentration of the atmosphere components. Nowadays, the research in this domain is more and more growing, in Europe and other countries in the world, for many applications, such as environmental protection, food industries, perfumery, public safety, medicine, and pharmacy. Electronic noses allow to detect many organic volatile compounds, for which there is no specific detector. They constitute an alternative to complex, long, and too expensive existing methods, unable to ensure continuous monitoring. Their conception deals with many related areas (metrology, chemistry, physics, electronics, informatics, statistics, modelisation) as well as areas related to the molecules to be detected. The system training is a primary step: during a measurement under a gaseous atmosphere, we must record the sensor time-responses in a treatment system, while specifying the name of the concerned odor. This process must be repeated many times for each studied atmosphere, and for all the chosen atmospheres. So a learning data base can be created, made from representative parameters of all the realized measures. After this training stage, clustering software will classify the data analysis in “concentration” or “nature” groups. Using the group separation rules given by this supervised classification, the system will be able to find itself the name of an odor or a concentration. Copyright © 2014 IFSA Publishing, S. L.