A smell reproduction technique is useful in the field of virtual reality. We have developed the system called an odor recorder for reproducing the smell recorded using the odor sensing technique. We proposed the new type of the odor recorder using the inkjet devices together with a mesh heater. Droplets with tiny volume were forcibly evaporated to generate smell rapidly and reproducibly. Moreover, the mesh heater was directly connected to the sensors without plumbing tubes and the sensors were placed away from the wall of sensor cell. The recording time of the odor with high odor intensity became much shorter than that of the previous system. Then, the recipe of jasmine scent composed of benzyl acetate and Ylang Ylang was successfully determined using the proposed system.

A study of apple flavor, banana flavor, and their chemical components was performed using an array of quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) gas sensors coated with sensing films such as lipids or stationary phase materials for gas chromatography (GC). The steady state sensor responses measured by a static measurement system were used to evaluate the characteristics of the different samples by principal component analysis (PCA) method. Since the array has shown good discrimination properties for fruit flavor components providing useful information, it was used to investigate the components that primarily contribute to the odor of the flavors. The results obtained from principal components analysis aided by sensory test were also used for an attempt to synthesize apple and banana flavors using only three of its odor components.