Analysis of concentrations of ternary solution with NaCl and sucrose based on a multifunctional sensor

Ternary solution with NaCl and sucrose is widely employed in osmotic dehydration process of food. This paper presents a multifunctional sensor being capable of directly sensing temperature and two physical parameters of solutions namely, ultrasonic velocity and electrical conductivity. Then the concentrations of various components in ternary solution with NaCl and sucrose can be simultaneously analyzed. A regression algorithm based on natural cubic spline interpolation and the least squares method is developed to estimate the concentrations of NaCl and sucrose, which performs the temperature compensation of the multifunctional sensor and decouples the estimations in 4D (four-dimensional) space into 3D (three-dimensional) space. This sensor could prove valuable as a process control sensor in food industry fields.