Portable Olfactometric Platform for Scent Tea Classification

Electronic Noses (ENs) are analytical systems whose operation is based on emulating the sense of smell of mammals and insects. ENs have demonstrated their effectiveness during the last two decades when used in the food and environmental industries. They have been used in tasks such as quality control, determination of contaminants, classification of products, to name a few. On the other hand, olfactometric systems can be used to evaluate the smell’s reaction to controlled stimulus. However, conventional olfactometric devices are meant to be used with biological systems. This work shows the results of the analysis of tea samples (dry commercial tea bags) carried out using a custom portable olfactometric platform to stimulate a custom EN system based on Metal Oxide Gas Sensors (MOGS) and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The obtained results show a classification accuracy greater than 80%, which denotes that the developed devices and experimental protocol are suitable for evaluating tea samples.