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Odour Consultancy

Air Spectrum offers three stages of odour consultancy.

Category odour scaling

Any manufacturing environment such as a bitumen refinery, chemical production, or food-processing unit typically has several exhaust points between the internal production areas and the outside environment. Very often it is the smallest, seemingly insignificant, exhaust stack that yields the most serious contribution to site odour. Only from a process of close examination of air emission points can the major source can be determined.

Category odour scaling fully qualifies all the sources of odour emission within a site boundary, ranking them in order of significance of contribution to the net odour yield. This critical step ultimately helps to identify the appropriate odour abatement system.

Our senior consultant, accompanied by the site’s environmental manager, carries out the assessment, pinpointing the suspected sources. A joint determination is made by safely smelling the source of odour at each emission point, scoring it against an index of 10 (10 being nominally high). Using this index, scores for other locations are allocated. Occasionally a new source can have higher odour strength than the original, resulting in a score higher than 10 being awarded. In addition, the volume or emission rate of the odour source is also considered and tallied with the strength of odour.

By determining the exact odour emission points on a site prior to attempting any form of abatement or process control, significant time and money is saved and a more likely outcome of success ensured.

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Olfactometric sampling and analysis

In all industrial processes, exact odour concentration determination provides valuable process management indicators. For example, in the wastewater industry a noticeable increase in odour yield may indicate a biological process becoming inefficient. Similarly, in the composting of organic materials, an increase in the strength of odour may indicate inefficient ventilation of the material.

Olfactometric sampling and analysis provides a reliable measurement of odour concentration, thereby providing valuable data from which to make reasoned odour management decisions.

Olfactometry is the scientific measurement of odour concentration utilising a system of sampling and a regulated methodology to the standard for Olfactometry BSEN13725.

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Odour dispersion modelling

Processing operations of any nature that are located within large urbanised areas need to ensure strict environmental compliance, especially where potential nuisance by odour can escalate into complaints, investigation and enforcement. Failure to act on odour emissions can destroy local public relations, attract bad publicity and ultimately result in financial pain and restrictions on operations.

As the logical extension of in-depth odour analysis, odour dispersion modelling provides a comprehensive representation of the odour source and its manipulation by local topographic and meteorological conditions. It concludes with a clear presentation of the impact of the odour on the local environment.

Various data is drawn together and entered into the modelling software by our trained consultants. Data includes odour emission rates for the relevant odour sources on a client’s site, topographical data detailing the surrounding building structures and lie of the land and local meteorological data. Together this data is comprehensively analysed and conclusions drawn by our consultant as to its relevance to a particular matter of concern for the client. Once a model has been established then it can always be rerun in the future if new data is derived.

Click here to contact us about odour consultancy

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