The electronic nose is an emerging technology dedicated to the detection and classification of odors. I have been working on an Interprofessional Project (IPRO) at the Illinois Institute of Technology over the past two semsters with Dr. Peter Lykos, Dr. Joseph Stetter, and Dr. William Penrose. We have been able to design an electronic nose from scratch that is composed of an array of chemical sensors and a data acquition unit. My main project was to develop the software neede to catalog the sensor responses and use a neural network technique or a statistical means to identify the signal. In the end I opted for a method called Principal Component Analysis. You can visit the E-Nose home page which includes many other interests including the sampling, circuitry, experiences, etc.
I have also been doing coffee research. Some excellent websites can be found here.
Here is a new addition made the the electronic nose. Do to Dr. Stetter's and Dr. Penrose's research we installed a filament which acts like a pseudo-mass spectrometer. Saturated hydrocarbons (Like methane), and aromatics (Like toluene) are relatively inert to electrochemical sensors. We try to break them down by "burning" them in air. The animation represents methane, CH4, not being effected by the OFF filament, but burning in air to product CO, H2O, CO2, and nitrogen oxides (NOx) when the filament is ON.
We have results, and as soon as a can place them here I will.