industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney ...

industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney 2007
Technology
During the course of this project, many different technologies were researched, some for
dispersion techniques and other for smell sensing possibilities.
Sensing
From the outset, it seemed that there were many different potential applications for a device
that could sense the constitution of an ambient odour. A portable device that could record
smells to play back later could be considered a memory recorder and player. Some
other examples include device that:
…could smell when your food was cooked,
…could sense if there were poisonous gases in the environment,
…knows fake from genuine items,
…could tell you if you had body odour or if there were a ‘bad’ smell in your apartment,
…could indicate whether there were a compatible sexual partner in the vicinity,
Etc.
These would all be some very new and innovative products so research was carried out to
discover if this was a feasible direction. The first possibility comes from that flexible material,
Quantum Tunneling Composite (QTC). While interviewing the head of Peratech, the
company that owns this material, he explained that it has been shown that QTC can sense
certain smells. How does it do this? QTC is basically a polymer impregnated with super
small particles of conductive material. When force is applied, the material turns from an
insulator to a conductor, all the way from infinite resistance to only a few ohms in a nonlinear
yet reproducible manner. The really interesting thing is that volatile organic compounds
(VOCs or smells) make this material expand in their presence. Each different
polymer reacts differently to each different VOC causing a measurable change in resistance.
So, in theory, a bank of these (tiny) chips could sense any smell.
Luca Turin, mentioned above, has just formulated the theory on how we actually sense
smells. It is based on the fact that each VOC vibrates at a different set of frequencies, and
the bank of resonating sensors in our nose can thus decode the smell. The company, Cyrano
Technologies, has swiftly put this theory into an application. They use the fact that vibration
causes piezoelectric chips to produce a voltage. Each chip produces a maximum
voltage at its resonant frequency. They are integrating this within security checks in airports,
to discover weapons, explosives and drugs.
The sensing of smells is sure to be a very exiting time for product design, but I felt there
were too many hurdles to overcome and take it out of the conceptual stage at the present.
Peratech claim that they can create the specific QTC to sense a specific VOC but this research
is in its infancy and development would take time.
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