Electronics

 Description of Industry

Electronics is perceived by many as an unlikely industry to experience odor issues. However, this is not the case. Odor from electronics may be indicative of excessive or unsafe environmental exposure during manufacture or shipping. It may also indicate a manufacturing defect, for example circuit board construction.  Components such as adhesives, labels, and printing, may become odorous under certain conditions such as elevated temperatures. VAC identifies potential off-odor issues and provides proactive recommendations.

Applicable Services

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What we do

By developing aroma profiles for your end products, you will have aroma and chemical baseline standards defined. These profiles can be used to compare and contrast to competitor products demonstrating your deficiencies or advantages for decision making. When a customer complaint occurs you will avoid the time consuming work of determining of what is considered the standard aroma profile and can concentrate on the difference in the complaint profile vs. an existing aroma profile.  We are in the business of helping our clients reduce risks related to odor and educate our clients on the benefits of using proactive odor control measures including aroma baseline analysis.

When odor is perceived people panic. Whether there is a toxicity issue or not, and most of the time there is not, odor brings about unwanted distractions and risk to your reputation. Most of the time this occurs due to the unknowns involved. Any off-odor can impact substantially your bottom line without immediate intervention. VAC can help reduce your risk from off-odors affecting your products and help resolve problems in the most expedient manner.

Odor Problems and Complaints

Burnt, solvent, glue, plastic, metallic, acrid, sharp are odor descriptors commonly used to describe the smell given off by some electronic components.  If off-odor is a problem in one of your products, contact us.  We design solutions to mitigate these type issues.

Related News, Case Studies, and Blog Posts

Quality Analysis of Printed Circuit Boards

Printed circuit boards (PCBs) and 1206 sized components were placed in a hot chamber at 255 oC for 2.5 minutes and off-gassing chemicals were trapped by Tenax molecular sieve/ cyrotrap with liquid nitrogen. Chemical identities were determined by gas chromatography/ mass spectrometry. The most striking difference between printed circuit boards (PCBs) was due to a large abundance of the industrial solvents tripropylene glycol bispropanol and N-methylpyrrolidinone. These were present in far greater quantity in wet paste boards compared to reflowed and bare boards. Chemical abundance was far less in bare boards compared to wet paste and reflowed boards, and smaller still when analyzing 3 1206 sized components (only). Of...

What is Off-Odor?

What is off-odor?  The true answer is you’ll know it when you smell it!  Doesn’t have to stink like dead fish or 2 week old ground beef left in the refrigerator, although those certainly are obnoxious.  Off-odor can be a nice fresh floral smell, like that of a rose, only the rose aroma originates from a batch of freshly roasted pecans.  The rose aroma doesn’t belong there.  It detracts from the richness of deep, warm, roasted pecan aroma. Many off-odor projects we tackle at Volatile Analysis involve issues akin to that of rose-pecan.  Aroma chemistry tells us one very common fragrant molecule that has an aroma similar to rose is...

Statistics of Sensory Assessment: Cohen’s Kappa

Statistics of Sensory Using people as diagnostic sensors produces more variation than instrumental methods. There are situations where the benefits of human-based measures outweigh their inconsistency. This is particularly true for aromas and flavors. Choosing, training and aligning panelists is a big investment. If sensory activities are key to your business success, you need to know how well your system is performing. Evaluating sensory judge quality can be challenging. Between-judge agreement appears simple, yet it is critical to success. Cohen's Kappa One approach to evaluating agreement involves Cohen’s Kappa. For example, the judges measure a set of standards for intensity, using four levels. The collected impressions are then compared. A Kappa table looks like...