Study of recording apple flavor using odor recorder with five components

Abstract

The odor recorder has been developed using the odor sensing system based on the active sensing method to electronically record odors and reproduce them anytime and anywhere. The recorder developed in this paper has capability of recording the target odor, the mixture of five odor components, using the odor sensor array composed of quartz crystal microbalance sensors. The difference between the sensor response patterns of the recipe and target odors was minimized so that the recipe of the five components for the target odor was determined. In this paper, the method of selecting the most appropriate sensors to record odors was investigated based on the condition number of the sensor array sensitivity matrix. Moreover, the method of determining the parameters of the odor-recording algorithm was studied. As a result, several apple flavors composed of the five components were successfully recorded. Furthermore, the typical apple flavor composed of nine components was approximated using the mixture of the five components. The approximation result by the sensing system was successfully verified by the human sensory test.