A Multi-purpose, Programmable Smoking Machine

Commercially available cigarette smoking machines are designed to operate at a standard set of smoking parameters and offer little scope for changing the smoking pattern. This paper describes a Programmable Smoking Machine (PSM) which operates in a way that no current commercial machine can. It can smoke cigarettes in a non-standard manner and obtain information useful for the examination of the influence of smoke generation patterns on the smoke yields as an aid to the design of cigarettes. The PSM consists of a stepper motor driven glass syringe and three-way valve controlled by microcomputer. Suitable programs create the desired smoking patterns and control the operation of the smoking machine via a microcomputer port. Precautions must be taken to prevent stepper motor pulses affecting the puff profiles. Smoking can be performed in a restricted or open mode with calibrated clearing puffs, and the vapour phase collected is directed on a puff-by-puff basis to a gas analyser or trapping medium at a controlled rate. It is also possible to generate whole smoke should this be a requirement.