India: An e-nose to rate jasmine fragrance
Developed jointly by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), Kolkata and the Department of Floriculture, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, this handheld electronic device, will help assess quality of the fresh flower, determine harvesting time for extraction, assess industrial quality and identify ideal concrete extraction stage.
How it works
The extract of jasmine flower, called concrete, is highly valuable for perfume, confectionery cosmetics and toiletry industries.
“The fragrance assessment has more or less been subjective until now. The analysis was (and is still being) done using GCMS (Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrography) instruments. This not only requires technically trained hands to operate the instrument, but is time consuming and expensive. The instrument costs around ₹40 lakh and it takes about 5 hours to complete assessment of a sample,” M Kannan, Professor and Head of the Department, explains.
E-Nose, therefore, is expected to be a breakthrough.
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