Odour Monitoring in a Wastewater Treatment Plant by portable Ion Mobility Spectrometry

Instrumental Odour Monitoring Systems are often based on gas sensor arrays, or eventually on single sensor solutions for major odorants. In this work, we investigate the use of a portable Ion Mobility Spectrometer (IMS) as an Instrumental Odour Monitoring System (IOMS) for monitoring odorous emissions from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). This preliminary study was carried out on two plants in Pinedo (Valencia), i.e., P1 and P2. Three field campaigns (January-June-July) captured seasonal and wastewater variations, employing chemometric analysis and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to distinguish Water line and Sludge line emissions. Random Forest (RF) and Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) were used to develop an odour classification model. External validation achieved an 87% accuracy for P1 July and results for P2 January-June. These results prove the IMS potential to be used for enhanced odour emission classification, possibly in combination with other monitoring techniques.