Nuisance odor levels produced by solid waste management operations are subject to regulatory standards due to their impacts on the quality of life of the residents living nearby the facility. Failure to meet regulatory standards may result in fines, litigation, inability to acquire permits, mitigation, and re-siting operations. Since measurement of environmental nuisance odors is currently limited to subjective techniques, monitoring odor levels to meet such standards is often problematic. This is becoming more acute as increasing residential populations begin to encroach on properties adjacent to landfills. In order to ensure that nuisance odor issues are minimized, it is necessary to provide an objective measurement. The objective of the current research is to develop a biosensor for providing an objective, standard measurement of odors. The approach is to modify the human odorant binding protein (hOBPIIa), isolated using published biomolecular techniques, by fluorescently tagging it with a chromophore functional group. When this protein is tagged with a fluorophore marker and excited in a spectrofluorometer, it emits light of a certain wavelength that can be detected and quantified. Once odorant molecules are exposed to this complex, they start replacing the fluorophore, and as a result, the emitted light intensity decreases in proportion to the number of odorant molecules. Since the protein response depends on odorant concentration, following an inverse Beer’s Law relationship, the odorants can be quantified accurately and rapidly using fluorometric measurements. The results establish quantitation ranges for different pure and mixture of odorant gases as well as the amount of gas that can be quantified across various flow rates. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fau.edu/oai:fau.digital.flvc.org:fau_42643 |
| Contributors | Rahman, Sharmily (author), Meeroff, Daniel E. (Thesis advisor), Florida Atlantic University (Degree grantor), Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatics Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science |
| Publisher | Florida Atlantic University |
| Source Sets | Florida Atlantic University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, Text |
| Format | 132 p., application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author with permission granted to Florida Atlantic University to digitize, archive and distribute this item for non-profit research and educational purposes. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions requires permission of the copyright holder., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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