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The World Leader in Early Warning and Detection
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In an age when time is money, a few extra seconds can literally mean the difference between a minor hiccup and a total catastrophe. And of course, life and death.
But imagine having extra hours, or even days to act?
Traditional monitoring systems provide a means to control fire and alarm systems, however, by the time they detect the fire using even modern smoke detectors, the damage is already done and it may even be too late.
Chemical Intelligence Technology (C-it) is the world leader in early warning and detection solutions and has developed a unique range of detection devices that can actually detect by smell.
Some of the world’s largest corporations depend upon C-it for the prevention of major catastrophe by providing the ultimate means to detect any trouble - fast.
With C-it, your business gains from our wealth of experience in industrial early warning, detection and prevention.
Be sure to work with a team with a proven track record of success. Your success depends on it!
To find out more, call us today.
Electronic Noses - The Future
At C-it, we have only just begun to explore the potential of our remarkable technology.
In the field of microbiology, our sensors are showing enormous promise in detecting various organisms, and one day we’ll realize the dream of a breathalyzer that can detect lung cancer, or tuberculosis.
Detectors that can smell explosives or other noxious substances can be placed in public places to ensure the safety of train, bus and airplane passengers against terrorist attack.
Sensors could be placed near our rivers and waterways to detect any toxic waste being illegally dumped, or provide an early warning of contamination.
The possibilities are unlimited.
Electronic Nose Can Detect Asthma in Patients
Researchers have been developing an electronic nose to perform several medical tasks. A group of Italian researchers found that an electronic nose can detect asthma in patients more successfully than urrent methods..
The electronic nose is made up of an array of gas sensors. By exposing those sensors to patients’ exhaled and in-lung air, the device can literally sniff out the presence of asthma. In a test involving 14 people, the electronic nose proved to be 87.5 percent accurate, compared to conventional tests like fraction of exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) and lung function tests, which were 79.2 percent and 70.8 percent accurate respectively.
Researchers found the electronic nose was at its most accurate when combined with a FeNO test. Once perfected in the lab, the electronic nose will hopefully serve as a more accurate way of diagnosing asthma.
Artificial 'Snot' Enhances Electronic Noses
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Researchers at The University of Warwick and Leicester University have used an artificial snot (nasal mucus) to significantly enhance the performance of electronic noses.
The researchers have coated the sensors used by odour-sensing "electronic noses” with a mix of polymers that mimics the action of the mucus in the natural nose. This greatly improves the performance of the electronic devices allowing them to pick out a more diverse range of smells.
A natural nose uses over 100 million specialised receptors or sensors which act together in complex ways to identify and tell apart the molecules they encounter. Electronic noses, used in a number of commercial settings including quality control in the food industry, use the same method but often have less than 50 sensors. This means that electronic noses can discern a much smaller range of smells than the natural nose.
However the University of Warwick and Leicester University team have found a way to replicate in their electronic devices how the natural nose’s mucus enhances our sense of smell.
In the natural nose the thin layer of mucus dissolves scents and separates out different odour molecules in a way they arrive at the noses receptors at different speeds/times. Humans are then able to use this information on the differences in time taken to reach different nose receptors to pick apart a diverse range of smells.
The Warwick and Leicester team have employed an artificial mucus layer to mimic this process. They placed a 10-micron-thick layer of a polymer normally used to separate gases on the sensors within their electronic nose. They then tested it on a range of compounds and found that their artificial snot substantially improved the performance of their electronic nose allowing it to tell apart smells such as milk and banana which had previously been challenging smells for the device.
University of Warwick researcher Professor Julian Gardner says: “Our artificial mucus not only offers improved odour discrimination for electronic noses it also offers much shorter analysis times than conventional techniques”.
The final device including the sensors and the artificial mucus is contained in a relatively thin piece of plastic just a few centimeters square and costing less than five UK pounds (10 US Dollars) to produce.
The research has just been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society and the research was funded by EPSRC.
University of Warwick (2007, April 30). Artificial 'Snot' Enhances Electronic Nose. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 21, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070430093948.htm
Electronic Nose Can Select Produce With Appealing Aromas
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The use of an electronic smelling system capable of discriminating which tomatoes, melons or other products have a more attractive aroma is a particularly valuable aid for agro-food firms. However, existing electronic noses do not "smell" in the same way depending on the laboratory conditions, and these conditions change throughout the day and from one day to another.
In order to overcome these fluctuations, researchers from the Agro-Food Quality Improvement Group at the University Jaume I (UJI) have developed a statistical methodology which enables the aromatic characteristics of different samples of a product to be compared efficiently, so that the best quality items can be selected.
To date the samples analysed, both on the day and between days, underwent a series of fluctuations because "the environment, laboratory temperature, humidity, and so on exert a significant influence, which means that to ensure the evaluations are useful an extensive amount of correction work has to have been carried out through a methodology that can be transferred to other teams and products," explains Salvador Roselló, a researcher from the UJI.
This methodology, which corrects the fluctuations in the analyses on the day and between days, is based on Mercedes Valcárcel's thesis, entitled "Optimization of the process of evaluating and selecting tomato germplasm according to organoleptic quality characteristics: use of NIR technology and electronic sensors".
The electronic smelling system is an instrument equipped with chemical sensors and a chemometric program for pattern recognition, which is able to recognise and compare individual or complex odours. Like the human olfactory system, its purpose is to relate the perceived aroma with a response that, after being stored in a memory unit, could serve as a model for subsequent analyses. Electronic noses have found one of their natural areas of application in the agro-food industry.
The electronic nose enables a large number of samples to be analysed while maintaining the overall aromatic impression. Until now, the two systems commonly used to analyse samples have been, as Roselló explained, "on the one hand, a tasting panel consisting of experts who provide information that is valuable but which is of limited use and very expensive, as only a few tastings can be made each day. The other system involves chemical analysis, via a gas-mass spectrometer, which provides information on all the volatile compounds in a product so that you can compare between variables. However, this information is too abstract and the global evaluation is lost."
The electronic nose takes interesting features from these two systems and tries to avoid some of their problems. "In an improvement programme, if you want to select a specific variety, sometimes you have hundreds or thousands of samples, because you're selecting a segregating generation, where there are quite different individuals, and what you really want is to select the best ones. This therefore completely rules out the use of a tasting panel. Analytic selection gives more information, but the overall impression is lost," explains the researcher. And as an example he points out that "in the case of tomatoes, there are more than 40 aromas involved but the number does not matter: the important thing is that as a whole they are perceived to be appropriate.
Another advantage of using this equipment is that samples can be frozen and evaluated gradually so that "in a period of some months, you may have evaluated significant numbers of samples." The research group at the UJI is applying the possibilities offered by the electronic nose in studies to improve varieties of tomatoes. "We also have experience in research with melons, so this experience would be easy to extrapolate to tomatoes. To work with other products, we would have to adjust the parameters the equipment works with," states Roselló. The Universitat Jaume I is working at present with several tomato and melon companies.
The electronic nose is particularly useful, as Roselló remarked, for seed companies, which need to select their plant material and to offer a differentiated product, and for this reason they devote significant amounts of resources to R&D. It could also be particularly useful to improve the quality control systems of food manufacturing firms.
All the electronic nose systems that currently exist on the market consist of three distinct parts. The first one involves taking the sample. Given the volatility of the substances involved, this process is based on the technique of static headspace. The volatile compounds, concentrated by heating in the steam phase which is on the sample (liquid or solid), are introduced into the sensor system that measures the different physical and chemical properties of the components of the aroma. It then converts the smell into a measurable signal which is processed by a computer by means of chemometric techniques and the results are plotted on a chart that represents the fingerprint of this odour. Thus, taking the sample, the set of sensors and the data processing system are the essential parts of any commercial electronic nose.
University Jaume I (2009, December 22). Electronic nose can select produce with appealing aromas. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 21, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091221130402.htm
E-Noses: Testing Their Mettle Against Fly Noses
Drosophila melanogaster – the fly whose olfactory receptors were used to benchmark the electronic nose. |
Scientists from CSIRO’s Food Futures Flagship have made a breakthrough in efforts to extend the sensory range of ‘electronic noses’ (e-noses) by developing a system for comparing their performance against the much-superior nose of the vinegar fly.
“Although e-noses already have many uses – such as detecting spoilage in the food industry and monitoring air quality – they are not as discriminating as biological noses,” according to CSIRO scientist, Dr Stephen Trowell.
“Our efforts to improve e-noses recently received a boost following our development of a new system which enables us to compare technical sensors with biological sensors.
“We looked at how the most common type of e-nose sensors – metal oxide or ‘MOx’ receptors – sample the air around them. This is a critical factor in the performance of all noses. We then compared it with the performance of odorant receptors from the vinegar fly, Drosophila.
“We already know that fly receptors, unlike most other bioreceptors, are not very specific. Even so, it really surprised us how much narrower the responses of the MOx sensors were than the biological ones. We also found that the fly bioreceptors outperformed the MOx sensors in their levels of independence. The fly seems to make a range of broadly tuned receptors that are independent of each other and human engineers haven’t yet worked out how to do this.
“These results, published today in the science journal PLoS ONE, will help in the design of better e-noses and help us understand better how biological systems work,” Dr Trowell said.
Bio-benchmarking approaches such as this could also be applied to other classes of electronic nose sensors. The CSIRO research team is looking to collaborate with developers of solid-state chemical sensors in the search for more effective devices.
This research is part of a much larger project developing an improved electronic nose, the Cybernose®, for use in the wine industry. Using insect receptors, the Cybernose will detect volatiles and contaminants in grapes and wine, thus allowing winemakers to improve their wines. When completed, the Cybernose will have wide application for detecting ripeness and spoilage in a range of foods as well as other applications such as detecting explosives.
The comparisons between the fly’s receptors and those of the e-nose were made possible by recent descriptions of how odorant receptors function in Drosophila, which was the first insect to have its genome described. It was this new knowledge of the fly’s genome that made the fly odorant receptor work possible.
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