What is it about?
Fragrance compounding relies on trained human noses and slow analytical methods. This poster explored whether ultrafast laser measurements could provide a faster, more objective alternative. We measured the thermal lens signals of individual fragrance ingredients using femtosecond laser pulses. Each ingredient produced a distinctive temporal profile. When we measured binary mixtures, the combined signal reflected the composition in a predictable way, suggesting that thermal lensing could serve as a rapid screening tool for fragrance quality control. This was early-stage work, presented as a poster at an ACS meeting. The measurements demonstrated feasibility but did not yet include the full statistical framework developed in our later paper on the same topic.
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Why is it important?
The fragrance industry needs rapid, non-destructive methods for verifying blend compositions. Chromatography provides definitive answers but takes hours. Sensory panels are subjective and expensive. Thermal lens spectroscopy occupies a middle ground: fast (seconds per measurement), non-destructive, and sensitive to molecular composition. This poster demonstrated that the technique can distinguish different fragrance ingredients and detect composition changes in mixtures. The later full paper (Compositional Analysis of Fragrance Accords, Chemistry Asian Journal 2025) built on these preliminary results with a complete statistical analysis framework.
Perspectives
This poster came from work at the end of my undergraduate degree, following an internship at a fragrance company. I wanted to see if the ultrafast spectroscopy techniques I was learning could solve a real industrial problem. The measurements were straightforward, but interpreting mixture signals turned out to be harder than expected. Simple linear decomposition did not work well, which is what motivated the more sophisticated statistical approach in our later paper. Despite being preliminary, this work established the experimental protocol that we used for the next seven years of measurements.
Rohit Goswami
University of Iceland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ultrafast insights for predictive fragrance compounding, April 2020, American Chemical Society (ACS),
DOI: 10.1021/scimeetings.0c03998.
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