Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are organic chemicals with a high vapour pressure at room temperature. Depending on their origin and formation mechanisms, VOCs serve as markers in various industrial processes, including food production. The primary objective of EVOQUE is to develop a novel photonic-based sensory system capable of surpassing current standards and meeting the demanding requirements in agriculture, food production, environmental pollution monitoring, and industrial emissions tracking.
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are organic chemicals with a high vapour pressure at room temperature. Depending on their origin and formation mechanisms, VOCs serve as markers in various industrial processes, including food production where they act as quality indicators, technological benchmarks, and process contaminants. In plant phenotyping, they function as botanical or geographical tracers and authenticity markers, while in crop storage, they indicate shelf-life. However, VOCs also present hazards to human health and the environment.
The primary objective of EVOQUE is to develop a novel photonic-based sensory system capable of surpassing current standards and meeting the demanding requirements of at-line, on-line, and in-field applications in agriculture, food production, environmental pollution monitoring, and industrial emissions tracking. EVOQUE will integrate gas chromatography (GC), Quartz Enhanced Photo-Acoustic Spectroscopy (QEPAS), long-wavelength quantum cascade lasers (QCLs), and mid-IR metasurfaces to create a compact, user-friendly, cost-effective, at-line, and ultimately online VOCs analyser with performance equivalent to the gold standard lab-based GC-MS.
EVOQUE will leverage GC's ability to separate components from complex mixtures and QEPAS's high sensitivity, specificity, and quantification. Unlike simpler GC detectors, QEPAS will offer molecular recognition based on the specific spectral features of individual VOCs, enabling the detection of target compounds even in the presence of interferents. This mitigates issues such as poor repeatability of elution times and reduces the false positive rate compared to GC with non-specific detectors.
Furthermore, optical spectroscopy of many VOCs is hindered by absorption by atmospheric compounds at the wavelengths of interest or overlapping absorption features of related molecules. However, using the GC column, these compounds are separated and eluted from the column at different times, unlocking the potential of photonics for sensitive, rapid, and non-destructive VOC measurements.