Near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy for predicting free water content of beef

Abstract

Abstract. Water content is a primary determinant of consumer satisfaction of beef, this study displays a novel water content non-destructive detection technology. Water is the one of the important attribute of beef, in traditional study, the research objective are always aiming to get the total water content with the influence of different types of water ignored, but the quality decline even the decay of meat is mainly caused by the free water, which is one of the fractions of water of myowater, then the free water content detection technology would be studied, furthermore, according to the classified results based on water physical and chemical structure in muscle, a novel extracting method for free water content is also developed by means of water characteristic. Then as the important measurement technique, non-destructive detecting system based on spectra analysis in Near Infrared (NIR) band (wavelength range: 900-2500nm) was constructed, where, Partial Least squared regression (PLSR) was carried out and the correlation coefficient of free water prediction model was R>0.85. Such result indicates that the free water detecting experiment is reasonableness and suitable to forecast based on NIR spectra.