Living as he does near a wastewater treatment plant, Santiago Marco knows all about recurring odors fouling the surrounding air. So the researcher at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia developed an e-nose that, when paired with a drone, may help managers proactively reduce the stink their facilities emit.
Up to now, smells produced by wastewater treatment plants and other facilities processing or storing pong-prone substances have been carried out by humans. Bags of pungent air are collected, brought to a lab, plugged into a device, and released with lowering levels of oxygen mixed in until the odor is registered by people breathing it in. Marco and his team used a similar approach to train a portable electronic sensor to sniff out some of the most common and objectionable stenches treatment plants give off. Once they’d refined its olfactory capacities, the researchers strapped their e-nose to a drone for air collection and analysis above the sources of…
