A Product Engineering Approach: Diffusion and Performance of Fragranced Products

Introduction Chemical product design & engineering has emerged over the last decade as a new paradigm within Chemical Engineering academia but also its related industry. 2 In fact, it is the answer to a global change in the chemical industry economy: in the past driven by technological expansion for the large production of commodities, towards a market-driven manufacture of high addedvalue, specialty and performance products as happens today. 3 The relevance of introducing perception, and namely consumer perception, in the design of chemical products has been recently highlighted as an important step for product design. Among the different types of perception, those related to chemical perception (chemosensory) and namely olfaction and taste are still difficult to work with. This is due to the complexity of the processes involved in olfaction at the biochemical level but also the large palette of available perfumery raw materials found in nature or chemically synthesized. Fragrances are presented in countless products we deal with everyday like perfumes, shampoos and soaps among many others. In fact, more than three-quarters of toiletries and household products contain a fragrance in its composition. However, the design of fragranced products is still a combination of art, technology, and some type of scientific knowledge, although the former predominates at the industry. 5 In order to reduce subjectivity and empiricism in this field, we have developed an integrated theoretical model to assess the performance of fragrances considering the release and diffusion processes together with predicted odor intensity over time and distance from the source. In order to achieve that goal, our model combines different scientific fields: Thermodynamics, Transport Phenomena and Psychophysics into a common product fragrances. This approach is within Product Engineering which in this case is applied to Perfume Engineering as shown in Figure 1.