Adulteration of Milk Identification Using Ionic Polymer Metal Composite as Sensor

Abstract

Milk adulteration is found as one of the social problems throughout the globe. Consumption of adulterated milk causes various diseases in humans and great concern to the food industry. Adulteration is generally done by adding chemicals to the milk, especially water. Inappropriately, milk is being very easily adulterated throughout the world and significantly worse in developing and underdeveloped countries due to the absence of adequate monitoring and lack of proper law implementation. The international and national research surveys presented the use of various electrochemical, nanomaterial, and thermal sensing mechanisms for the detection of adulteration in milk (example: spectroscopic methods, thermal sensors, chitosan-multiwalled carbon nanotubes, etc.). However, the ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) is used as a sensor or actuator; for this application, IPMC is explored as a sensor for detecting the impurities in milk. IPMC used in this experiment is Nafion base, which is a sulfonated tetrafluoroethylene based fluoropolymer-copolymer. In this letter, the authors took the opportunity to use the electroactive polymer material IPMC as a taste sensor.