Assessment of odour activity value coefficient and odour contribution based on binary interaction effects in a waste disposal plant

The odour activity value (OAV) has been widely used for the assessment of odour pollution from various sources. However, little attention has been paid to the extreme OAV variation and potential inaccuracies of odour contribution assessment caused by odour interaction effects. In our recent studies (Wu et al., 2015), an odour activity value coeffici ent (γ) was first proposed to evaluate the type and the level of binary interaction effects based on the determination of OAV variation in the binary odorous mixture. By multiplying OAV and γ, the odour activity factor (OAF) was used to reflect the real OAV. The correlation between the sum of OAF and odour concentration reached 80.0 ± 5.7%, which was 10 times higher than the sum of OAV used before. Results showed that hydrogen sulfide contributed most (annual average 66.4 ± 15.8%) to odour pollution in the waste disposal plant. However, as the odour intensity of samples in summer is rising, the odour contribution of trimethylamine was improved to 48.3 ± 3.7% by the synergistic interaction effect, which was not found in previous studies