Olores.org Newsletter May 2022

  In May 2015 the decision was made, by a positive vote in Technical Committee 264 ‘Air Quality” of the Committee Européen de Normalisation (CEN), to establish a preliminary work item “Air quality – Continuous instrumental odorant monitoring in air to assess risks of odour (nuisance) and safety” which was entrusted to working group WG41 "Electronic sensors for odorant monitoring" for a period of 6 years starting on 2015-05-12. The Dutch member of CEN, NEN, was assigned the secretariat and the author of this article was appointed as convenor.

  The first meeting of WG41 was held on the 22^nd of October 2015 in Antwerp. After 20 meetings over 6 years, we have come to the end of the time assigned without presenting a final draft standard for voting to the TC 264 “Air Quality.

   Alternative husbandry methods are playing an increasingly important role in terms of animal welfare. In order to ensure that odour pollution from freely ventilated "animal welfare-friendly" fattening pig houses can be adequately taken into account in odour surveys for approval procedures in Germany, the odour annoyance and respectively the hedonic odour effect was investigated in more detail starting from these types of houses.

   The odour annoyance potential of three alternative fattening pig houses was investigated by creating polarity profiles according to guideline VDI 3940 part 4. It was found, that the annoyance potential of those alternative housing forms with natural ventilation and outdoor area as outdoor climate stimulus, as well as bedding (straw), is lower compared to conventional housing forms.

   In this work, the physico-chemical, olfactometric and textural characterization of granular activated carbon (GAC) from the odor adsorbent beds of an urban wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), as well as the chromatographic quantification of the retained odoriferous compounds, were carried out.

   These techniques allowed an integral evaluation of such adsorbent material, which came from the deodorization at four stages of integral wastewater treatment (pretreatment header: GAC-1; sand and fat removal: GAC-2; sludge thickening: GAC-3; sludge dewatering: GAC-4).

   Instrumental Odour Monitoring Systems (IOMS) represent the only tool available for environmental monitoring capable to perform real-time characterization of ambient air. They have been commonly used to assess odour impact at receptors thanks to their capability to detect odours and identify their provenance. An emerging application of IOMS concerns the real-time monitoring of emissions at plant fencelines. To do this, IOMS must provide a fast and accurate measurement of the odour concentration.

   The most common approach, currently applied for odour quantification models, involves simplified regression algorithms, neglecting the classification of detected odours before quantification. This results in poorly accurate estimations of the odour concentration since IOMS responses to samples having the same odour concentration, but representative of different sources, may differ significantly.