Abstract
During the phenomenon of food degradation, several volatile organic compounds are generally released. In particular, due to lipid oxidation in stored and packed meat, hexanal is formed as a typical decomposition product. Therefore, its detection can provide an important indication of the quality and conservation of meat. Unfortunately, the simultaneous release of other compounds, such as 1-pentanol and 1-octen-3-ol, during the first phase of the degradation process can have an undesirable effect on the detection of hexanal. In this work, a metal oxide (MOX) sensor based on zinc oxide (ZnO) was prepared and tested for possible use in the monitoring of low concentrations of hexanal. The sensor was expected to detect the target volatile with minimum interference from all the others, when released all at the same time. For this purpose, the ZnO sensor was exposed to both pure and different mixtures of vapors of the main competing organic compounds. Comparing the results of the mixtures to the response relating to pure hexanal, it was highlighted that the presence of 1-pentanol and 1-octen-3-ol decreases the response of the sensor to hexanal in terms of the eR/R0 ratio, especially at low concentrations (5–10 ppm), while at 50 ppm, the sensor response was comparable with the hexanal quantity, proving that its detection was less affected at higher concentrations.
Highlights
The results showed that the interaction of the three volatiles on the zinc oxide (ZnO) surface interferes in the hexanal detection, reducing the sensor’s sensitivity in comparison to the response to the vapors of the pure component
The comparison with the responses to the binary mixtures (Figure 5a) shows that the inhibition effect on the hexanal detection is mainly due to the presence of 1-pentanol vapors, which is the dominant component among the two alcohols
A resistive sensor based on ZnO oxide was prepared and tested for possible use in the monitoring of food degradation phenomena
Summary
Shelf-life determination, and raw product control are important fields in which conductometric gas sensors have been applied in recent years. In these sensors, the gas detection mechanism is based on the conductance variation of a semiconducting metal oxide (MOX) layer caused by the chemical/physical adsorption of the gas molecules on the MOX surface [1]. A single sensor or at most a combination of two makes the detection system easy to use even for unskilled operators and transportable, even if it is not usable for generic analyses but suitably developed for a specific application. In this work, we studied the effect of the coexistence of the main volatiles formed during meat degradation on the response of a ZnO sensor to hexanal, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been reported yet
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