Investigation of Musty Malodor in Consumer Bath Towels with GCxGC and TOFMS

In this work, we investigated the volatile and semi-volatile chemical components of used consumer towels with a goal toward exploring the musty malodors. A collection of towel swatches, some with the malodor and some without, were sampled with headspace solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) and analyzed with GCxGC-TOFMS. There were some analytes of interest with known aroma properties similar to what was observed with the sensory analysis of the towels. An additional non-targeted review of the data was also performed to determine other analytes of potential interest. Various software tools facilitated these data analysis tasks and are also discussed