Monitoring of quality and storage time of unsealed pasteurized milk by voltammetric electronic tongue

A voltammetric electronic tongue (VE-tongue) was self-developed and applied to monitor the quality and storage time of unsealed pasteurized milk. The VE-tongue comprised four working electrodes: gold, silver, platinum, and palladium electrode. Two potential waveforms: Multi-frequency rectangle pulse voltammetry (MRPV) and multi-frequency staircase pulse voltammetry (MSPV) were applied to working electrodes in the study, and both of MRPV and MSPV consisted of three frequency segments: 1 Hz, 10 Hz, and 100 Hz. The total areas under the corresponding curves obtained by VE-tongue in the three frequencies were applied as characteristic data, which were evaluated by the principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA). The results of PCA and CA indicate that the milk samples of different storage time could be successfully classified by the VE-tongue based on MRPV and MSPV, respectively. Combining the areas obtained by the VE-tongue based on MRPV and MSPV, the classification results of PCA and CA were improved evidently. The total bacterial count, acidity and viscosity of the milk samples were also measured during the storage, and those physicochemical characteristics showed regular configuration in PCA and CA plots. Furthermore, the total bacterial count and viscosity properties were predicted by partial least squares regression (PLSR) and least squares-support vector machines (LS-SVM), and the combination of the areas obtained by the VE-tongue based on the MRPV and MSPV were applied as the input data of PLSR and LS-SVM. Both the prediction techniques performed well in predicting viscosity and total bacterial count, and the prediction results of LS-SVM were better than that of PLSR. Those results demonstrate that the VE-tongue could be applied to monitor the quality storage time of unsealed pasteurized milk.