Real-time Monitoring of Odour Concentration at the Inlet of an Abatement System by IOMS

Abstract

This paper describes the implementation of an Instrumental Odour Monitoring System at a wastewater treatment plant for the real-time measurement of the odour concentration at the inlet of a scrubber and the identification of anomalous odour peaks. This paper investigates the potentiality of an approach for odour quantification based on Support Vector Regression, which is suitable to deal with non-linear data and it is also able to account for the uncertainty of the reference method for measuring odour concentration, i.e. dynamic olfactometry. The results of this study prove the feasibility of implementing an IOMS for real-time measurement of odour concentration in a very complex real-life scenario, providing estimations on independent test samples collected after the model training with an accuracy and precision comparable to those of dynamic olfactometry. Further studies should confirm the results by considering a larger number of test samples, thereby finding a trade-off between statistical relevance of the test and cost for the olfactometric analyses.