In October 2016 we organized the first Odour Talks. The idea was to select key experts in several fields of odour management and to let them present a work of interest on the subject. To make this experience available to the rest of the world, we did a webcast online of the Talks. Some people subscribed to the webcast sessions and they could do online questions to the speakers. A few months after this experience, we have decided to make the videos available to everyone, so here you have the first Odour Talk by Mr. Jean-Michel Guillot.

   Mr. Guillot is professor at the École de Mines d’Alès in France. He has published over 50 papers on international journals and conference proceedings and he is involved in almost any initiative related with the management of odours in Europe. To date he is a member of the CEN Working Group 41 that is dealing with instrumental odour monitoring (aka e-noses). We had the pleasure of listening to what he has to say about e-noses in the Odour Talks.

   The definitive text of the Standard EN 16841 is finally available in the official language versions (English, French and German) and it has been distributed to the CEN/CENELEC members. That means that although it might take a while for the EN standard to be available for purchase in any CEN member website, the process has already started. 

   This European Standard is based on field inspections and it describes two methods for direct assessment of odours in ambient air making direct use of the effect of odorants on the human sense of smell. This European Standard EN 16841 is divided in two parts, the EN 16841-1:2016 that describes a grid method which uses direct assessment of ambient air by panel members to characterize odour exposure in a defined assessment area and the EN 16841-2:2016 that describes a plume method for determining the extent of the downwind odour plume of a source.