Abstract
Railway operators are performing various evaluations and taking various countermeasures concerning odors at restrooms in stations, as one of public restrooms, with many opinions by railway customers. Up to now, we have been explored odor sources with detection tubes easy to handle by using ammonia which is a representative odor component of restrooms as an indicator of the odor. But, in many cases, ammonia was not detected even at restrooms that fed unpleasant odor because the detectable concentration of the detection tubes was higher than detection threshold concentration (0.1ppm). Therefore, it sometimes did not lead to the detection of odor sources. So, a method for detecting ammonia with lower concentration has been needed in order to make it possible to search for ammonia odor sources on site.
To cope with such a situation, we made a prototype of a portable system for detecting ammonia using a sensor device for gaseous ammonia with higher detection sensitivity developed in the past. And we carried out demonstration tests with this prototype at three restrooms in stations with different odor strength. As a result, we confirmed that using this system, we could detect ammonia having lower concentration and that we could presume the location of the source of the ammonia odor in about 5 minutes.
