NEERI scientists develop e-Nose variant for detecting toxic gases

Scientists in India have developed their own variations of the e-Nose which will detect radioactive and other harmful toxic gases that are emitted by paper mills and other industrial units. This is an innovative research given that toxic gases can have an adverse impact on humans.

In its current form, the e-Nose can only detect harmful gases from a select number of sources but the researchers are working on bringing support for other gas emissions like petroleum or practically any other odor which can be harmful for the human body.

"This has been the first attempt in India to develop such a product using odour sensors that make use of intelligent software to identify odorous molecules. It is also possible to train the software by feeding information based on observation of experts", the Ministry Of Science And Technology said in a statement.

The e-Nose has a variety of sensors that can catch odors and build a pattern around them. This pattern is used to understand what's harmful and will notify the users accordingly. The sensor is able to learn new patterns using pattern recognition algorithms, principal component analysis, discriminant function analysis, cluster analysis and artificial neural networks.

It's currently being tested in mills across Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, while other parts of the country should see it soon. This is an industrial product and might not be obtainable for commercial use.

It is being developed by National Environmental Engineering Research Institute ( NEERI) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) along with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology of the Government of India.