Gee, Your Beer Smells Terrific

<editor's note>
From Wired News: 
</editor's note>

Gee, Your Beer Smells Terrific 
By Enrique Garabetyan 

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- After decades of advances in artificial 
enhancements to vision and hearing, the oldest human sense is finally 
getting some attention. The race has begun to build a better nose. 

Several electronic sniffers, or e-noses, have entered the market in 
recent years. These mostly cumbersome and expensive contraptions, which 
are employed by industries ranging from food processing to airport 
security to health care, sell for anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000. 

A newcomer called the Pampa, designed by researchers in Argentina, ups 
the ante in this growing field. Still in the prototype phase, the Pampa 
is a high-performance e-nose that's small enough to be portable yet less 
expensive than its older, larger rivals. It weighs less than two pounds, 
fits into a small plastic container about the size of a shoe box and 
sells for $5,000 to $10,000. 

Although the first operational model of the Pampa is still under 
development, several large food companies in South America are already 
expressing interest in the finished product. Beer manufacturers want the 
Pampa for monitoring the quality of hops, and producers of yerba mate 
(an herbal tea popular in Argentina, southern Brazil, Uruguay and 
Paraguay) want it for sorting brands and types of plant leaves. 

The Pampa can be modified to identify the properties of many food 
products, such as coffee, tea and olive oil. It may also be used to 
detect substances like poisonous gases and toxic chemicals. 

Still, some might wonder, why purchase an artificial e-nose when human 
beings come equipped with the real thing?  The reason is that humans 
have a relatively weak sense of smell, especially compared with other 
mammals. In addition, even the best biological sniffers, human or 
canine, cannot put up with a repetitive task designed to tap their 
sniffing powers. A few hours on the job will saturate the most expert 
snout and make it unable to discern between subtly different substances. 

"For half or even a fifth of the current usual prices, our customers 
will get a custom-made and fine-tuned product," says Maximiliano Fisher, 
an engineer and the project's product development coordinator. 

"Our device is already light and accurate," says Alfredo Boselli, a 
physicist working on the project. "The next step is to upgrade the 
gas-diffusion chamber to enhance real-time data acquisition and develop 
a friendlier display of the results."  The current market for electronic 
sniffers is estimated in the low tens of millions of dollars annually, 
but experts say it is growing fast. 

Back to February 2003 front page