A smart system to detect volatile organic compounds produced by hydrocarbons on seawater

Hydrocarbons are considered one of the most important and dangerous pollutants for environment, in general, and for marine environment in particular. Their detection can be performed in several ways, employing different kinds of systems, such as fixed gas analyzers or gas chromatographs, to be mainly used in laboratory, or portable analyzers, having good performances but a considerably high cost. In this paper, an innovative approach to overtake this problem is proposed by using an array of commercial sensors properly placed into a flow chamber and managed via a control electronics. An artificial neural network was designed, realized, and properly trained in order to detect the concentration of the hydrocarbons detected and to discriminate the detected hydrocarbon from a given dataset. Results obtained were satisfying, with good performances of the neural network proposed, probably representing a good basis for future systems based on electronic nose technology. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.