Use of Vis/NIRS for the determination of sugar content of cola soft drinks based on chemometric methods

Abstract

Three different chemometric methods were performed for the determination of sugar content of cola soft drinks using visible and near infrared spectroscopy (Vis/NIRS). Four varieties of colas were prepared and 180 samples (45 samples for each variety) were selected for the calibration set, while 60 samples (15 samples for each variety) for the validation set. The smoothing way of Savitzky-Golay, standard normal variate (SNV) and Savitzky-Golay first derivative transformation were applied for the pre-processing of spectral data. The first eleven principal components (PCs) extracted by partial least squares (PLS) analysis were employed as the inputs of BP neural network (BPNN) and least squares-support vector machine (LS-SVM) model. Then the BPNN model with the optimal structural parameters and LS-SVM model with radial basis function (RBF) kernel were applied to build the regression model with a comparison of PLS regression. The correlation coefficient (r), root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) and bias for prediction were 0.971, 1.259 and -0.335 for PLS, 0.986, 0.763, and -0.042 for BPNN, while 0.978, 0.995 and -0.227 for LS-SVM, respectively. All the three methods supplied a high and satisfying precision. The results indicated that Vis/NIR spectroscopy combined with chemometric methods could be utilized as a high precision way for the determination of sugar content of cola soft drinks.