System schematic

The figure below presents schematic view of the experimental setup. There are two sample lines shown on the figure, each composed of the samle path and the air path. The paths are connected to the odor blnder through the solenoid valves. The odor blender collects all the sample lines and connects the samples' mixture to the QCM sensor cell. Using proper electronic circuits (oscillator circuits, multi-channel frequency counter), the sensors' responses are obtained and sent to the PC. Click on the figure below to find out more details about the system elements.

The principle of the odor recorder peroformance is as follows. First, the target flavor is measured using array of Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM) sensors. Then, the sensor array is exposed to the mixture of several components blended using an odor blender. The array output pattern for the mixture is compared with the one for the target flavor. Subsequently, the quantitative composition (odor recipe) of the mixture is iteratively adjusted so that the difference between the two patterns can be minimized. The recipe of the reproduced flavor is obtained after convergence.