Scientists Artificially Recreate Smells Successfully Using an Olfactory Display：Prof. Takamichi Nakamoto

A technology to generate a variety of scents by blending multiple odor components using mass spectra and multidimensional data analysis has been developed by Tokyo Tech researchers. They showed that the scents could be reproduced using a multicomponent olfactory display. Twenty odor components were extracted using the mass spectra of 185 essential oils. The sensory test for seven typical essential oils revealed that their scents could be successfully replicated.

Humans have always been curious; this is the primary driving force of human activities. Among the many endeavors we have undertaken driven by curiosity, recreating the way we experience the world around us in controlled settings have always been a major emphasis. We have recreated almost all senses; what we, we recreated as paintings, photographs, and movies, what we hear, as music, and so on. But the experiences of one sense have always been a challenge to replicate: the sense of smell. This is because unlike the other senses, the factors that let us smell something are more abstract and difficult to recreate exactly.

Various combinations of colors can be produced using three primary colors--red, green, and blue. Although a parallel concept of seven "primary" smells has been proposed before, creating various types of odors using these primary smells has not been achieved so far. A research team from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), led by Prof. Takamichi Nakamoto, recently made significant progress in this direction.

Using mass spectrometry, the research team characterized certain essential oils and extracted the corresponding basis vectors using multidimensional data analysis, as depicted in Figure 1. Next, the team created various scents by blending odor components corresponding to these basis vectors. The researchers mimicked a variety of smells simply by adjusting the mixture composition of various odor components. Moreover, an olfactory display was used to generate the scents instantaneously in the gas phase. Their detailed findings are published in IEEJ Transactions on Sensors and Micromachines.