Towards the Development of a Portable Smell-Seeing Electronic Nose and its Applications in Amine Recognition

A portable smell-seeing electronic nose (e-nose) device based on webcam and white LEDs was designed. The time stability and spatial uniformity errors of the device in color measuring was processed. Six kinds of sensitive materials, including porphyrins and phthalocyanines with typical central ions and functional groups, were selected to fabricate the odor sensitive arrays and their principles of color change upon interaction with odors were analyzed. The odor recognition capability of the e-nose was then tested by six volatile organic amines and the results showed that the designed smell-seeing electronic nose was capable of not only discriminating all the vapors correctly but also clustering those analytes with similar molecular structures and electronic properties.