Prototyping of an Olfactory Display supported by CFD Simulations

Olfactory Displays are devices used to generate and deliver scented air that is eventually smelled by the users. As the literature reports, their development and evaluation mostly rely on experimental activities based on a “trial-and-error” approach, which prevents a comparative analysis of designed solutions and their technical performances, thus leading to prototypes with low potential to become future products. In this paper, an innovative framework embedding Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations for designing, prototyping and testing new Olfactory Displays is proposed. After presenting the framework, the paper illustrates the settings for a multi-phase CFD analysis based on Discrete Particles Modeling for simulating olfactory displays. The design of a new wearable olfactory display is presented, detailing all the steps of the framework. A first architecture is devised, and an initial set of simplified 2D multi-phase CFD simulations has been used to propose possible improvements. A new design has been developed, and a 3D CFD simulation has been run to predict its performance. A set of experiments has been conducted to test the real prototypes and compare the performance with the one predicted by the simulations. The experimental results are in good accordance with the simulations, which have proven their effectiveness in improving the design of the olfactory displays.