Odor intensity evaluation in gas chromatography olfactometry by finger span method

This paper describes the potential of evaluating odor intensities in a gas chromatographic effluent by cross-modality matching with the finger span (GC-O-FSCM). A simple prototype is described that allows the precise measurement and acquisition of the distance between the thumb and another finger during the analysis. The stimulation of panelists at the sniffing port with ethyl butyrate shows a log-log relation between peak height values obtained from finger span and stimulus concentrations. It also shows that all panelists are able to perform this task but with different precision, which is used to select them. A triplicate evaluation by GC-O-FSCM of the intensity of flavor constituents in synthetic solutions shows that a four-member panel is perfectly able to determine most of the characteristics of the solutions and to create a finger span multidimensional space highly correlated with the theoretical intensity space.