Investigation of Air Quality beside a Municipal Landfill: The Fate of Malodour Compounds as a Model VOC

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an investigation on ambient air odour quality in the vicinity of a municipal landfill. The investigations were carried out during the spring–winter and the spring seasons using two types of the electronic nose instrument. The field olfactometers were employed to determine the mean odour concentration, which was from 2.1 to 32.2 ou/m3 depending on the measurement site and season of the year. In the case of the investigation performed with two types of the electronic nose, a classification of the ambient air samples with respect to the collection site was carried out using the k-nearest neighbours (kNN) algorithm supported with the cross-validation method. Correct classification of the ambient air samples collected during the spring–winter season was at the level from 71.9% to 87.5% and from 84.4% to 94.8% for the samples collected during the spring season depending on the electronic nose type utilized in the studies. It was also revealed that the kNN algorithm applied for classification of the samples exhibited better discrimination abilities than the algorithms of the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and quadratic discriminant function (QDA) type. Performed seasonal investigations proved the ability of the electronic nose to discriminate the ambient air samples differing in odorants’ concentration and collection site.