Artificial olfaction systems : principles and applications to food analysis

Among the numerous applications of electronic nose technology, the analysis of foodstuff is one of the most promising and also the most travelled road towards industrial applications. On the other hands, since human senses are strongly involved in the interaction with foods the analysis of food provides an excellent field to compare the performances of natural and artificial olfaction systems. The electronic nose, being non-destructive and, in principle, directly correlated with the consumer perceptions, is a good candidate to develop quality evaluation tools for quality assessment. In this paper, the application of electronic nose to the evaluation of quality of foods is discussed. As selected example, the measure of quality of fruit is outlined. The experiments described have been performed with an electronic nose developed by the authors and of which a description is also given