Odour and Emissions Problems

The continuing drive to improve customer care and the high profile of health and safety issues, has led to pressure on the suppliers of plastics components to certain industries to minimise odours, and volatiles in general, from their products. This is particular tme of the automotive industry. 

There are a number of specific tests that automotive companies insist that plastics components manufactured 

For quality control purposes it is the case at present that human smell panels will be used in preference to instrumental analytical techniques which do not yet adequately mimic the human response. There are practical drawbacks to this approach, leading to a lot of research going into electronic noses utilising a number (e.g., 32) of sensors based on organic conducting polymers. These devices enable fingerprints of satisfactory products to be recorded which are used as references for quality checks. 

Work has been carried out to determine the additives which contribute the most to the overall odour of plastic products. One of the most useful techniques is headspace GC-MS. It is advisable to use the dynamic form of headspace sampling as this enables the volatiles from the sample to be concentrated. This benefit is important as some chemical species can cause an odour problem at very low levels due to the specific sensitivity of the human nose. 

For this type of work the dynamic headspace sampler (e.g., the Perkin Elmer ATD 400) is operated in a diffusion mode where the sample is heated at a relatively low temperature (e.g., 50 °C), which helps to ensure that additional volatile species are not generated due to degradation of the sample, for a relatively long period of time (e.g., in excess of 30 minutes). The odour species collected in the trap of the dynamic headspace sampler can then be analysed under the following conditions  

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