Gas in the kitchen or boiler room is not new. It provides warmth, allows food to be cooked, and keeps machines running. Many of us are also familiar with the smell of natural gas. More precisely, what we take for the smell.
In fact, methane is a colorless and odorless substance. And the fact that a person cannot feel it until the moment the state of health begins to deteriorate makes this substance very dangerous. By the way, the gas that moves through the main gas pipeline also has no smell. In order to protect the population, eliminate or minimize the threat to life, reduce the likelihood of accidents, and also try to make the detection of methane leakage easier, it was decided to add a special odorant. A strong-smelling substance is added to the gas at a low concentration. But it irritates a person's receptors so much that when the amount of gas in the room is equal to 1% of the air volume, a person will already feel the smell inherent in one or another odorant. This is very important because a small spark is enough to ignite the gas in the room, causing a sudden release of thermal energy and triggering an explosion. Odorants are usually special compounds of chemicals. They contain sulfur as well as sulfides. As a consequence, the strongest and most irritating odor will be felt in a mixture of several such odorants. So, the familiar natural gas in the kitchen has a smell that vaguely resembles the smell of rotting onions. In Russia, ethyl mercaptan is most often used as an odorant. The degree of saturation of natural gas with odorants is controlled by special equipment based on chemical, organoleptic and physicochemical methods. Similar installations are located at gas distribution stations, which inject odorant into the methane. The same procedure occurs with bottled gas, which, for example, is used in the internal combustion engines of your car. Gas in cylinders at the dacha also goes through the process of odoration.
