山中 高夫

The smell reproduction technique in addition to that for vision and hearing will be useful in the fields of virtual environments, games and e-commerce. In this study, citrus flavors were electronically recorded using. "odor recorder" composed of quartz crystal microbalance odor sensors. First, an artificial orange flavor composed of 14 constituents was successfully recorded with its approximated recipe of 3 odor components. The human sensory test revealed, that the reproduced odor was close to the target odor for the human olfaction. Next, we tried to record natural smells from citrus essential oils. The mixture smells of two essential oils were successfully recorded using the odor recorder.

The smell reproduction technique in addition to those for vision and hearing will be useful in the fields of virtual environments, games and e-commerce in fragrances and foods. We have developed an odor recorder to record odors using quartz crystal microbalance sensors and to reproduce them based on the recorded data. In this paper, the results of recording dynamical changes in odors in the atmosphere are described. The dynamical changes in the odors were successfully recorded in spite of the rapid change of the odor concentration over a few seconds due to the airflow turbulence. First, the change in a binary mixture of apple-flavor components was successfully recorded using the odor recorder based on a feedback control. Next, the changes in four fruit flavors, apple, mandarin, pineapple, and banana flavors, were successfully recorded using the odor recorder based on a pattern classification method.

多数成分から成る混合臭の匂いを電子的に記録するために,新しい方式の匂い記録・再生システムを開発した.記録・再生システムでは,匂いセンサアレイを用いて,対象臭と同じ応答パターンを持つような複数要素臭を自動調合してその混合比を探索し,その比率を匂いレシピとして記録する.しかし,要素臭数を増やすと同一のセンサ応答パターンを持つ混合比が多数存在するようになり,従来,6要素臭以上を用いて記録を行うことが出来なかった.そこで,本稿では,特異値分解を用いて匂いレシピの探索空間の次元数を下げ,雑音の影響を除去してレシピ探索を行う方法を考案した.その結果,りんご臭に関して,特異値分解法により8要素臭を4次元空間に圧縮して対象臭を記録できた.記録した匂いを官能検査により評価して,対象臭と同じ匂いを再現できたことを確認した.