A Novel Nanoscaled Chemo Dye–Based Sensor for the Identification of Volatile Organic Compounds During the Mildewing Process of Stored Wheat

Abstract

This work presents a novel colorimetric sensor based on nanoscaled chemo dyes which can detect inert volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during the mildewing process of stored wheat. 1-Octen-3-ol and 3-octanone were selected as the marked compounds by gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis. In this work, poly(styrene-co-acrylic acid) microbeads were prepared by soap-free emulsion copolymerisation. Boron-dipyrromethene dyes with PSA were fabricated as a novel sensor to obtain digital data before and after exposure to VOCs, and the correlation coefficients (R2) between the digital data and the concentration of VOCs were 0.8078 and 0.8324, respectively. And root mean square errors (RMSEs) were 3.05 g L−1 and 1.65 g L−1, respectively. The data based on the identification of mouldy wheat samples were processed by principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The optimal performance obtained for the LDA model was 83.33% in the prediction set and 90% in the calibration set.