Electronic Nose Technologies in Monitoring Black Tea Manufacturing Process

Abstract

“Tea” is a beverage which has a unique taste and aroma. The conventional method of tea manufacturing involves several stages. These are plucking, withering, rolling, fermentation, and finally firing. The quality parameters of tea (color, taste, and aroma) are developed during the fermentation stage where polyphenolic compounds are oxidized when exposed to air. Thus, controlling the fermentation stage will result in more consistent production of quality tea. The level of fermentation is often detected by humans as “first” and “second” noses as two distinct smell peaks appear during fermentation. The detection of the “second” aroma peak at the optimum fermentation is less consistent when decided by humans. Thus, an electronic nose is introduced to find the optimum level of fermentation detecting the variation in the aroma level. In this review, it is found that the systems developed are capable of detecting variation of the aroma level using an array of metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) gas sensors using different statistical and neural network techniques (SVD, 2-NM, MDM, PCA, SVM, RBF, SOM, PNN, and Recurrent Elman) successfully.