Coding smell patterns of crude oil by the electronic nose: A soil pollution case

In our study, we leveraged an electronic nose to detect the patterns of crude oils and their mixtures, sourced from the oil fields from neighboring regions in pursuit of the task of environmental impact evaluation. The temporal dynamics of oil-related patterns acquired by an electronic nose was tracked to identify the influence of high or low emissions of volatiles that depend on the oil composition. Analyzing the oils by Fourier-transform IR-spectroscopy and GC×GC-MS, we confirmed the correlation between sensor responses and the oil compositions, significantly dependent on the ratio of aromatic compounds/alkanes. Using pattern recognition techniques, Random Forest classifier enabled good accuracy of classification of oil samples and contaminated soils underscoring a high-resolution distinction between the response data. Applying these principles to determine the oil origin, we observed that the studied oil samples and contaminated soil samples corroborate with the dynamic changes in odor patterns based only on volatile and semivolatile compounds. Crude oils from the border of two oil fields facilitate a change in the odor pattern to remain one of the fields depending on the weathering time. These proposed intelligent multisensor systems show great promise as a tool for estimating oil-contaminated soils, thereby potentially enhancing environmental monitoring practices. © 2024 Elsevier B.V.