Aging time and brand determination of pasteurized milk using a multisensor e-nose combined with a voltammetric e-tongue

• Five pasteurized milk brands were differentiated using e-nose and e-tongue.
• E-tongue allowed a correct distinction of the milk brands comparing to the e-nose.
• The combined system allows determining the storage days of pasteurized milk.
• No clear storage day’s discrimination can be drawn when applied e-systems separately.
• Data fusion method has been successful in the identification of the storage days.

A combined approach based on a multisensor system to get additional chemical information from liquid samples through the analysis of the solution and its headspace is illustrated and commented. In the present work, innovative analytical techniques, such as a hybrid e-nose and a voltammetric e-tongue were elaborated to differentiate between different pasteurized milk brands and for the exact recognition of their storage days through the data fusion technique of the combined system. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has shown an acceptable discrimination of the pasteurized milk brands on the first day of storage, when the two instruments were used independently. Contrariwise, PCA indicated that no clear storage day's discrimination can be drawn when the two instruments are applied separately. Mid-level of abstraction data fusion approach has demonstrated that results obtained by the data fusion approach outperformed the classification results of the e-nose and e-tongue taken individually. Furthermore, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) supervised method was applied to the new subset and confirmed that all storage days were correctly identified. This study can be generalized to several beverage and food products where their quality is based on the perception of odor and flavor.

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