Application of an electronic nose to monitoring of a bio-technological process for contaminated limes clean-up in a oil rendering plant

In this paper the electronic nose technology is applied, for the first time, to the monitoring of a bio-technological process used for the pollution break-down in waste limes produced in a oil rendering plant. The electronic nose here described is based on a set of metalloporphyrins coated quartz resonators. The array matched with a proper chemometrics and neural network data analysis techniques shown positive results both in qualitative terms (recognition of the different cleaning steps) and quantitative (estimation of pH, total hydrocarbons, ammonia, and phenols) of the contaminated limes.