Olfactory Display Using Solenoid Valves and Fluid Dynamics Simulation

Abstract

Olfaction is now becoming available in Multiple Sensorial Media because of recent progress of an olfactory display. One of the important functions of the olfactory display is to blend multiple of odor components to create a variety of odors. We have developed the olfactory display to blend up to 32 odor components using solenoid valves. High -speed switching of a solenoid valve enables us to blend many odors instantaneously at any recipe even if the solenoid valve has only two states such as ON and OFF. Since it is compact and is easy to use, it has been so far used to demonstrate a movie, an animation and a game with scents. However, a contents developer must manually adjust its concentration sequence because the concentration varies from place to place. The manually determined concentration sequence is not accurate and, moreover, it takes much time to make the plausible concentration sequence manually. Thus, it is adequate to calculate the concentration sequence using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulation in the virtual environment. Since the spread of odor in spatial domain is very complicated, the isotropic diffusion from the odor source is not valid. Since the simulated odor distribution resembles the distribution actually measured in the real room, CFD simulation enables us to reproduce the spatial variation in the odor intensity that the user would experience in the real world. Most of the users successfully perceived the intended change in the odor intensity when they watched the scented movie, in which they approached an odor source hindered by an obstacle. Presentation of the spatial odor distribution to the users was tried, and encouraging results were obtained.