Modern Applications of Electronic Nose: A Review

Electronic noses have provided a plethora of benefits to a variety of commercial industries, including the agricultural, biomedical, cosmetics, environmental, food, manufacturing, military, pharmaceutical, regulatory, and various scientific research fields. Advances have improved product attributes, uniformity, and consistency as a result of increases in quality control capabilities afforded by electronic-nose monitoring of all phases of industrial manufacturing processes. This paper is a review of some of the more important and modern applications that have been of greatest benefit to the humankind.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v3i1.122

Heavy metal/toxins detection using electronic tongues

FAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOCNPQ - CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICOThe growing concern for sustainability and environmental preservation has increased the demand for reliable, fast response, and low-cost devices to monitor the existence of heavy metals and toxins in water resources. An electronic tongue (e-tongue) is a multisensory array mostly based on electroanalytical methods and multivariate statistical techniques to facilitate information visualization in a qualitative and/or quantitative way. E-tongues are promising analytical devices having simple operation, fast response, low cost, easy integration with other systems (microfluidic, optical, etc) to enable miniaturization and provide a high sensitivity for measurements in complex liquid media, providing an interesting alternative to address many of the existing environmental monitoring challenges, specifically relevant emerging pollutants such as heavy metals and toxins.73119FAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOCNPQ - CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICOFAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOCNPQ - CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICOSem informaçã

Gas sensing technologies -- status, trends, perspectives and novel applications

The strong, continuous progresses in gas sensors and electronic noses resulted in improved performance and enabled an increasing range of applications with large impact on modern societies, such as environmental monitoring, food quality control and diagnostics by breath analysis. Here we review this field with special attention to established and emerging approaches as well as the most recent breakthroughs, challenges and perspectives. In particular, we focus on (1) the transduction principles employed in different architectures of gas sensors, analysing their advantages and limitations; (2) the sensing layers including recent trends toward nanostructured, low-dimensional and composite materials; (3) advances in signal processing methodologies, including the recent advent of artificial neural networks. Finally, we conclude with a summary on the latest achievements and trends in terms of applications.Comment: arXiv admin comment: This version has been removed by arXiv administrators as the submitter did not have the rights to agree to the license at the time of submissio

Smart Gas Sensors: Materials, Technologies, Practical ‎Applications, and Use of Machine Learning – A Review

The electronic nose, popularly known as the E-nose, that combines gas sensor arrays (GSAs) with machine learning has gained a strong foothold in gas sensing technology. The E-nose designed to mimic the human olfactory system, is used for the detection and identification of various volatile compounds. The GSAs develop a unique signal fingerprint for each volatile compound to enable pattern recognition using machine learning algorithms. The inexpensive, portable and non-invasive characteristics of the E-nose system have rendered it indispensable within the gas-sensing arena. As a result, E-noses have been widely employed in several applications in the areas of the food industry, health management, disease diagnosis, water and air quality control, and toxic gas leakage detection. This paper reviews the various sensor fabrication technologies of GSAs and highlights the main operational framework of the E-nose system. The paper details vital signal pre-processing techniques of feature extraction, feature selection, in addition to machine learning algorithms such as SVM, kNN, ANN, and Random Forests for determining the type of gas and estimating its concentration in a competitive environment. The paper further explores the potential applications of E-noses for diagnosing diseases, monitoring air quality, assessing the quality of food samples and estimating concentrations of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in air and in food samples. The review concludes with some challenges faced by E-nose, alternative ways to tackle them and proposes some recommendations as potential future work for further development and design enhancement of E-noses

Environmental engineering applications of electronic nose systems based on MOX gas sensors

Nowadays, the electronic nose (e-nose) has gained a huge amount of attention due to its ability to detect and differentiate mixtures of various gases and odors using a limited number of sensors. Its applications in the environmental fields include analysis of the parameters for environmental control, process control, and confirming the efficiency of the odor-control systems. The e-nose has been developed by mimicking the olfactory system of mammals. This paper investigates e-noses and their sensors for the detection of environmental contaminants. Among different types of gas chemical sensors, metal oxide semiconductor sensors (MOXs) can be used for the detection of volatile compounds in air at ppm and sub-ppm levels. In this regard, the advantages and disadvantages of MOX sensors and the solutions to solve the problems arising upon these sensors’ applications are addressed, and the research works in the field of environmental contamination monitoring are overviewed. These studies have revealed the suitability of e-noses for most of the reported applications, especially when the tools were specifically developed for that application, e.g., in the facilities of water and wastewater management systems. As a general rule, the literature review discusses the aspects related to various applications as well as the development of effective solutions. However, the main limitation in the expansion of the use of e-noses as an environmental monitoring tool is their complexity and lack of specific standards, which can be corrected through appropriate data processing methods applications

Microbial and non-microbial volatile fingerprints : potential clinical applications of electronic nose for early diagnoses and detection of diseases

This is the first study to explore the potential applications of using qualitative volatile fingerprints (electronic nose) for early detection and diagnosis of diseases such as dermatophytosis, ventilator associated pneumonia and upper gastrointestinal cancer. The investigations included in vitro analysis of various dermatophyte species and strains, antifungal screening, bacterial cultures and associated clinical specimens and oesophageal cell lines. Mass spectrometric analyses were attempted to identify possible markers. The studies that involved e-nose comparisons indicated that the conducting polymer system was unable to differentiate between any of the treatments over the experimental period (120 hours). Metal oxide-based sensor arrays were better suited and differentiated between four dermatophyte species within 96 hours of growth using principal component analysis and cluster analysis (Euclidean distance and Ward’s linkage) based on their volatile profile patterns. Studies on the sensitivity of detection showed that for Trichophyton mentagrophytes and T. rubrum it was possible to differentiate between log3, log5 and log7 inoculum levels within 96 hours. The probabilistic neural network model had a high prediction accuracy of 88 to 96% depending on the number of sensors used. Temporal volatile production patterns studied at a species level for a Microsporum species, two Trichophyton species and at a strain level for the two Trichophyton species; showed possible discrimination between the species from controls after 120 hours. The predictive neural network model misclassified only one sample. Data analysis also indicated probable differentiation between the strains of T. rubrum while strains of T. mentagrophytes clustered together showing good similarity between them. Antifungal treatments with itraconazole on T. mentagrophytes and T. rubrum showed that the e-nose could differentiate between untreated fungal species from the treated fungal species at both temperatures (25 and 30°C). However, the different antifungal concentrations of 50% fungal inhibition and 2 ppm could not be separated from each other or the controls based on their volatiles. Headspace analysis of bacterial cultures in vitro indicated that the e-nose could differentiate between the microbial species and controls in 83% of samples (n=98) based on a four group model (gram-positive, gram-negative, fungi and no growth). Volatile fingerprint analysis of the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid accurately separated growth and no growth in 81% of samples (n=52); however only 63% classification accuracy was achieved with a four group model. 12/31 samples were classified as infected by the e-nose but had no microbiological growth, further analysis suggested that the traditional clinical pulmonary infection score (CPIS) system correlated with the e-nose prediction of infection in 68% of samples (n=31). No clear distinction was observed between various human cell lines (oesophageal and colorectal) based on volatile fingerprints within one to four hours of incubation, although they were clearly separate from the blank media. However, after 24 hours one of the cell lines could be clearly differentiated from the others and the controls. The different gastrointestinal pathologies (forming the clinical samples) did not show any specific pattern and thus could not be distinguished. Mass spectrometric analysis did not detect distinct markers within the fungal and cell line samples, but potential identifiers in the fungal species such as 3-Octanone, 1-Octen-3-ol and methoxybenzene including high concentration of ammonia, the latter mostly in T. mentagrophytes, followed by T. rubrum and Microsporum canis, were found. These detailed studies suggest that the approach of qualitative volatile fingerprinting shows promise for use in clinical settings, enabling rapid detection/diagnoses of diseases thus eventually reducing the time to treatment significantly.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo