Testing of an electronic nose using conducting polymer sensors was done to measure the detection threshold of acetic acid in water, acetic acid in oil and also of synthetic pig slurry composed of ten organic compounds. A human odor panel also analyzed the same odor samples. The nose performed well in the evaluation of acid acetic in oil but important differences were obtained between the results of the nose and the one of the human panelists for the water-based solutions due to the humidity from those solutions. Different approaches and mathematical analysis were used and evaluated for their ability to simulate the discrimination of the human panel. For the experiment conditions, Fisher’s Linear Discriminant Analysis gave the best performance. However any changes in the experimental set up that would have an impact on variability would necessitate re-evaluation of the approaches and analysis.

The electronic nose is a tool that is not yet ready for odor analysis of slurry. However, such a tool will be very valuable when its ability to reproduce human olfactory reaction will be improved as costly olfactometry analysis could be replaced by in situs analysis with a nose.