Olfactory Characterisation of Odours for Optimising Impact Assessment

Complaints due to odour annoyance have become a major issue for intensive livestock, waste management and wastewater treatment operators. Odour assessment (using dilution olfactometry) does not take into account odour quality or their intensity, which is needed to be defined to understand olfactory impact. The proposal aims to apply a sensory analysis approach using olfactory-GC-MS to characterise different odorous emissions. A range of pattern recognition techniques, from simple statistical analyse to artificial neural networks will be used to summarise the data for nuisance evaluation to develop relationships between dominant odours and the chemical composition of processes at different stages.