Artificial Nose Works By Color

Alien54 writes: "As reported here in the Science Daily News, chemists Kenneth Suslick and Neal Rakow at the University of Illinois have developed an artificial nose that is simple, fast and inexpensive - and works by visualizing odors. Called "smell-seeing" by its inventors, the technique is based on color changes that occur in an array of vapor-sensitive dyes known as metalloporphyrins - doughnut-shaped molecules that bind metal atoms. Metalloporphyrins are closely related to hemoglobin (the red pigment in blood) and chlorophyll (the green pigment in plants) Smell-seeing arrays have many potential uses, such as in the food and beverage industry to detect the presence of flavorings, additives or spoilage; in the perfume industry to identify counterfeit products; at customs checkpoints to detect banned plant materials, fruits and vegetables; and in the chemical workplace to detect and monitor poisons or toxins. The full text is available as a PDF file (but is recommended for chemistry geeks only)."

Add that to the machines that analyze the "aura" of heated air that surrounds our bodies, and you can get a stinkometer the likes of which has been heretofore confined to the dark recesses of deodorant company imaginations. Till then, it looks like a cool approach to the problem of identifying smells electronically for all kinds of other purposes.

Comments

Electronic nose ?

[mirko]

Till then, it looks like a cool approach to the problem of identifying smells electronically for all kinds of other purposes.
I am not sure we might soon have some Stinkometer tomorrow as, if I understand that a device using this technology could detect some smell, and maybe recognize some that stink, there will still be issues about mixes, for example, if you take a flower perfume and some food smell, they could independantly smell good but their mix could smell awful (Roquefort cheese + flowers, for example).
Except in few cases when mixing odorous gas will induce molecular changes (that could reasonably make a sensor react properly), these smells will consist of sets of smell clouds which could independantly be analyzed but may probably not (yet) be classified as a unique smell type.
So, I accept the idea of an electronic nose though we may all agree that we need (1) enough sensors to detect all these subtilities (2) a brain in order to analyze the resulting smell by confronting all the sensor results simultaneously.
I don't even mention cultural facts that'll make (for example) alcohol, smell better for non-Muslims than for Muslims and thus will require different classification schemes.
A typical application of this study (IMHO) would be to detect gas (c3h8, c4h10) leaks in houses in order to avoid explosions. Cheers
PS: BTW, it is funny not to have a single occurrence of the word smell in the PDF file...
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Synthetic Synaesthesia

[stx23]

To create an array, the researchers paint a series of tiny dots - each dot is a different dye - on an inert backing such as paper, plastic or glass. The array is then scanned with an ordinary flatbed scanner or an inexpensive electronic camera before and after exposure to an odor-producing substance. "By subtracting the 'before' image from the 'after' image, we obtain the color-change pattern of the odorant," Suslick said. "By comparing that pattern to a library of color fingerprints, we can quickly identify and quantify the chemical compounds present."

scan, wipe, scan, compare.(hoping that the pantone references have not drifted) That just seems to take too long to get a result compared to a mass spectrometry approach. What make it better than this?
It just seems like something that sounds cool, but may not be all that practical in the real world.