An examination of the main components of the odor in the living environment and proposal of the method using the sensory evaluation

Abstract

We detected from the odor of living environment a large number of the odor substances using the olfactory GC-MS in the past study. However, it is not revealed what kind of substances contributes to actual odor. Therefore, in this study, we tried to clarify the similarity quantitatively to compare the odor type between the 21 kinds gasses of the single substance and the 3 kinds of the samples which we gathered from the living environment. When we compared the kind of odor by the SD method, sample A and sample B had high evaluation score such as “dusty (opposite word : clear)” “unpleasantness (opposite word : pleasantness)” and resembled octanoic acid and nonanoic acid, sample C had high evaluation score “sharp (opposite word : ambiguous)” and resembled stearic acid and phenylacetic acid. We calculated Pattern Similarity Value and the coefficient of correlation of the single odor substance and three samples by the mean of the score of SD method. They ranged from 0.946 to 0.999 and were very similar in any combination. The highest similarities among the samples were octanoic acid, nonanoic acid, undecanoic acid and phenylacetic acid.