By Li Fangwen

"In the ranking of automotive performance indicators that consumers are concerned about, odor in the car has surpassed vibration, noise, and fuel consumption to take the first place." Liu Xuefeng, director of the Materials Research Department of China Automotive Technology Research Center (CATRC), explained this viewpoint to more than 1,000 domestic and foreign guests at the 2018 (7th) China Automotive Materials (Xiqing) International Forum (hereinafter referred to as the "Materials Forum") held on March 29th.

The car odor problem has once again become a hot topic among the guests, whether it is the car odor or the presence of odorless harmful odor substances, resulting in the overall harmfulness of the new car continues to increase. "Although the car odor is intangible, but for the car, it is a tangible defect, from the safety point of view, is a security risk." Geely Automotive Research Institute vehicle engineering center deputy director Li Li told China Consumer News reporter, in recent years, with the automotive industry to maintain a steady and rapid development, automotive materials as the basic elements of industrial development, the development is very rapid. Among them, all kinds of non-metallic materials, in the car interior has been widely used, in the enhancement of consumer value experience at the same time, brought about by the car air pollution problems can not be ignored. Some of the non-metallic materials in the car, containing a large number of volatile organic compounds, not only easy to cause odor problems in the car, but also have a negative impact on human health.

In J.DPower's new car complaint list, the problem of odor inside the car ranked first for three consecutive years from 2015 to 2017.

Car odor, has become a persistent problem.

Artificial subjective evaluation leads to inconsistent standards

Why has car odor become a persistent problem? According to the speakers, although automobile enterprises attach great importance to the control of interior odor, the stability of the evaluation results and the detection efficiency need to be improved urgently due to the fact that the means of control is mainly based on manual subjective evaluation. And artificial subjective evaluation, but also lead to automotive odor evaluation standards are not uniform.

Automatic subjective evaluation of the car odor, some automotive companies with six levels of characterization means, some with ten levels of characterization means. Even if the same six-level characterization means of enterprises or the same ten-level characterization means of enterprises, it is the implementation of the standard degree of severity and inconsistency.

Different people, different life experiences and lifestyles, leading to different people's learning memory and accumulation process is not consistent. This results in different people perceiving odor levels differently, and the same odor being felt differently by different people in different situations.

The result is that the same odor, but in different companies, different people evaluation, but there are different levels of evaluation. Therefore, the use of artificial subjective evaluation is bound to give rise to the problem that it is difficult to unify the standard of odor in the car.

Because of the complexity of the odor itself, high mixing characteristics, resulting in the same material odor in the A qualified, in the B failed to pass the results appeared, which makes the odor management is very difficult, but also led to the car odor material control without regulatory constraints.

Deodorization means a variety of

Consumers in order to solve the odor problem, began to find their own solutions.

Currently on the market, a variety of new car odor supplies in the end how effective?

In the material forum, 3M automotive aftermarket service department product development department Mr. Huo Xin introduced the existing removal of automotive odor response program evaluation.

Currently, there are three common automotive odor response programs, namely passive, active, cleaning and disinfection.

Passive odor removal program, one of which is active carbon. But some activated carbon only a little adsorption effect, adsorption of saturation, will be released; after the formaldehyde not only less will become more.

The second is the photocatalyst, which is nanoscale carbon dioxide. Light irradiation in the nano carbon dioxide above, absorbing light to produce energy jump, produce oxygen radicals. In principle it is very environmentally friendly and good way, but photocatalysis is to see the light, if there is no light in the dark night will be limited.

The third is formaldehyde purifier. It can quickly reduce the concentration of formaldehyde around, using the concentration difference to continuously absorb formaldehyde or reactive VOC. the disadvantage is that the cycle of passive absorption is relatively long.

And active deodorization program, air purifier is a typical representative. Relying on the fan and power supply, the fresh air is constantly transmitted to the car, the more it circulates, the higher the purification efficiency.

Cleaning and disinfecting type of deodorization program, car service market is more common. It is more for germs, viruses and things like that. More representative of ozone disinfection. Ozone disinfection must control the total amount. Because too much ozone is actually harmful. It works faster than air purifiers; the disadvantage is that the volatilization persistence is very long.

Electronic nose to detect odors in the car

CACC and Geely *** with the formation of the odor research team, in order to achieve intelligent, rapid, non-destructive evaluation of the smell of the car to meet the practical application of corporate odor control needs, after more than two years of research work, the formation of the data, models, software, instrumentation, standard samples, technical specifications as the core of the business of the intelligent sense of smell framework, which can provide one-stop odor solutions for automotive companies.

The joint development team is focusing on building an odor pattern recognition solution for the automotive industry, which partially replaces, or even completely replaces, the human nose through big data and artificial intelligence technology to do an odor objectification evaluation. At the same time, the objective, fast, healthy automotive products and odor evaluation and control, to meet the industry now for the car smell database samples, analysis algorithms, models, leading the entire industry in the car smell related areas of technology and development.