Comparative Analysis of VOC Purification Techniques in Complex Cooking Emission: adsorption, photocatalysis and combined systems

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are molecules present in our everyday life, and they can be positive, such as in the formation of odour and food flavour, or harmful for both environment and humans, and the research in the recent dec-ades has been focusing on limiting their emissions. Various methods have been used to achieve this purpose. In the first part of this work, we review three main degradation methods: activated carbon, photocatalysis and a synergetic system between them. We provide a general overview of the operative conditions and report the possibility of VOC abatement, in particular VOCs that are produced in larger quantities during cooking. Within the literature, none of these systems has ever been tested in the presence of complex gaseous mixtures, such as during a cooking process. The aim of this study is to compare the three methods during the cooking of various types of burgers, in order to understand the behaviour of filter systems in the case of realistically complex gas mixtures. Proton transfer reaction - mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) has been used as real-time monitoring of volatilome. Since VOC emissions are highly dependent on the composition of the food cooked, we evaluated the degradation capacity of the three systems for different types of burgers representing meat, greens and fish burger. We demonstrate pros and cons of the photocatalysis and adsorption and how a combined approach generally provides an improved performance.