Detection of adulteration in extra virgin olive oils by using UV-IMS and chemometric analysis

The techniques of ion mobility are attractive for solving problems in the olive oil sector because they are techniques that provide information quickly, do not require sample preparation and represent a shift towards the use of environmentally-sustainable analytical techniques (green chemistry). This technique could be suitable to determine the origin of the olive oil, quality and adulteration. In this work, the authors propose the use of spectral fingerprint supplied by a home-made headspace system coupled to UV-IMS sensor in combination with multivariate calibration tools as an easy alternative for the detection of adulteration of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) with other vegetable oils such as sunflower, corn and seed oils. For it, 8 EVOO samples were adulterated with different proportion (among 10 and 50%) of these vegetables oils. Therefore, 96 adulterated samples were submitted to different chemometric treatments. The results obtained from PC-LDA-kNN model show the potential of this method to discriminate EVOO adulterated with oils of lower prices. PLS calibration also allows the quantification of the amount of vegetable oils added to EVOO containing at least 10% of other vegetables oils tested with good regression (R2 > 0.72) and RMSEC and RMSEC values lower than 9.22 and 12.62, respectively.