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Here's the smell-buster

NUS lecturer uses bacteria to gobble up smelly gases, the culprits behind odours. The result is clean, fresh air. Call him the smell-buster.

A National University of Singapore lecturer has successfully cultured bacteria so hungry for smelly gases that they literally gobble the smells up - resulting in clean, fresh air.

Associate Professor Lawrence Koe of the university's Civil Engineering department is also developing a machine that can tell if people's noses are up to scratch in the smell department. He has set up a local company, Aromatrix, to provide odour treatment and consultancy services. He explained that naturally-occurring bacteria are usually found in places like sewers. But they still smell bad because the bacteria are slow to eat up the main culprits behind the smell - hydrogen sulphide gases.

Prof Koe's laboratory creates an environment which enriches the bacteria, allowing them to grow rapidly. They are then placed in a special container and impure air is sucked inside. The "starving" bacteria consume the putrid gases quickly.

Aromatrix was one of three companies selected recently by the Enterprise Challenge (TEC), a Public Service Division scheme, for sponsorship. It will receive $250,000 to do trial of its gas-eating bacteria to treat sewage air at the Kranji Waste Water Treatment Plant. Prof Koe said that his method of removing odours from the air was friendlier to the environment and cheaper than current chemical systems, which require building safety systems and storage for chemicals.

Another product he has developed is a computerised olfactometer - a machine that measures the odour concentration in the air. The device tests the effectiveness of odour-control systems in various industries that have to deal with foul gases. The company is now looking for funding to develop a new machine that tells people how sensitive their noses are. This could be used to test whether a person's nose is good enough for certain professions that require a sensitive sense of smell, such as wine-tasting.

(The Straits Times, 14 June 2000)