Research and Application of In-Vehicle Odor Testing
- DOI
- 10.2991/978-94-6239-758-3_4How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- In-Vehicle Odor; Subjective Evaluation; Electronic Nose; VOCs
- Abstract
In-vehicle odor has become one of the most common complaints among car consumers, and its negative impact on brand loyalty cannot be underestimated. For a long time, the evaluation of in-vehicle odor has mainly relied on the subjective sniffing method by professional evaluators. However, this traditional method has many inherent drawbacks: it is highly dependent on the professional quality and experience of personnel, the evaluation results are strongly subjective due to individual differences, the repeatability of test data is poor, the efficiency of handling a large number of test tasks is low, the potential occupational hazards to evaluators are not clearly defined, and there is a serious shortage of high-level “golden-nose” odor evaluators who can provide authoritative evaluations.
Against this background, objective odor-measuring equipment has become an important solution. It aims to reduce the limitations of human-based evaluation and improve consistency and efficiency. At present, this type of equipment can be grouped into three main categories according to its working principle.The first category measures total volatile compounds (TVOCs). It reflects the overall concentration of volatile substances inside the vehicle, but does not distinguish individual components.The second category uses multiple sensors or detectors. Different sensors respond to different gases, and their combined signals form a multi-dimensional odor profile.The third category relies on substance separation technology. It separates mixed gases and performs qualitative and quantitative analysis at the molecular level. This approach identifies specific odor-causing substances and measures their concentrations.
The fundamental difference between these three types of equipment lies in the richness and precision of the detection data they can obtain. The more detailed and comprehensive the data, the more accurate and reliable the subsequent odor evaluation results will be. At present, relevant products of these three categories have been gradually launched on the market, and each category has shown different application characteristics and market acceptance in various fields such as automotive manufacturing, environmental monitoring, and food safety.
With ongoing progress in sensor materials, separation techniques, and intelligent algorithms, these technologies are expected to become more specialized. At present, most objective odor studies focus on odor intensity, because it is easier to measure and correlate with physical or chemical parameters. In contrast, odor pleasantness and persistence are more difficult to quantify. Pleasantness depends heavily on human perception, while persistence involves changes over time. Further development in these areas will require improvements in detection sensitivity as well as the accumulation of large experimental datasets to support model development and validation.
- Copyright
- © 2026 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Panpan Zhang AU - Qian Yao AU - Siwei Zheng AU - Yiquan Zhao AU - Chuanjie Li PY - 2026 DA - 2026/09/08 TI - Research and Application of In-Vehicle Odor Testing BT - Proceedings of the 2026 7th International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management (ICMSEM 2026) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 23 EP - 36 SN - 2352-5428 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-758-3_4 DO - 10.2991/978-94-6239-758-3_4 ID - Zhang2026 ER -