Chapter 7 - Role of different types of carbon nanotubes in food sciences and food sensing applications

Abstract

The population of the globe is predicted to be over 7.9 billion as of 2023 and 9.7 billion by 2050. Food demand has increased as a result of the growing population. The food sector regularly releases a vast variety of food products on the market to fulfill consumer demand. However, some of these food items can include dangerous additives including artificial flavoring, food coloring, and other toxins that could endanger the consumers’ health. It has become crucial to create the right analytical methods or tools for finding dangerous ingredients in food in order to assure food safety. Significant progress has been achieved recently in the creation of high-performance sensors for the evaluation of food safety. Due to their distinctive qualities, including great surface area, excellent mechanical strength, and high conductivity, carbon nanotubes (CNT) have emerged as a viable material for the construction of such sensors. CNT-based sensors provide greater signal conversion, increased sensitivity, and better detection accuracy, enabling the identification of contamination levels in food that were previously undetectable. This chapter emphasizes the types of CNTs and their features while concentrating on the improvements in CNT-based sensors’ applications in food safety inspection. Additionally, it demonstrates how CNTs can be extremely useful in food science and sensing technologies for food preservation and figuring out the quantities of different analytes found in food samples.