Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Electrochemical sensor devices have gathered great attention in food analysis namely for olive oil evaluation. The adulteration of extra-virgin olive oil with lower-grade olive oil is a common worldwide fraudulent practice, which detection is a challenging task. The potentiometric fingerprints recorded by lipid polymeric sensor membranes of an electronic tongue, together with linear discriminant analysis and simulated annealing meta-heuristic algorithm, enabled the detection of extra-virgin olive oil adulterated with olive oil for which an intense sensory defect could be perceived, specifically rancid or winey-vinegary negative sensations. The homemade designed taste device allowed the identification of admixing of extra-virgin olive oil with more than 2.5% or 5% of rancid or winey-vinegary olive oil, respectively. Predictive mean sensitivities of 84 ± 4% or 92 ± 4% and specificities of 79 ± 6% or 93 ± 3% were obtained for rancid or winey-vinegary adulterations, respectively, regarding an internal-validation procedure based on a repeated K-fold cross-validation variant (4 folds × 10 repeats, ensuring that the dataset was forty times randomly split into 4 folds, leaving 25% of the data for validation purposes). This performance was satisfactory since, according to the legal physicochemical and sensory analysis, the intentionally adulterated olive oil with percentages of 2.5–10%, could still be commercialized as virgin olive oil. It could also be concluded that at a 5% significance level, the trained panelists could not distinguish extra-virgin olive oil samples from those adulterated with 2.5% of rancid olive oil or up to 5% of winey-vinegary olive oil. Thus, the electronic tongue proposed in this study can be foreseen as a practical and powerful tool to detect this kind of worldwide common fraudulent practice of high quality olive oil.
Description
Keywords
Electronic tongue Chemometrics Olive oil Physicochemical analysis Sensory analysis Adulteration detection
Citation
Harzalli, Ussama; Rodrigues, Nuno; Veloso, Ana C.A.; Dias, L.G.; Pereira, J.A.; Oueslati, Souheib; Peres, António M. (2018) – A taste sensor device for unmasking admixing of rancid or winey-vinegary olive oil to extra virgin olive oil. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture. ISSN 0168-1699. 144, p. 222-231