Electronic nose for the identification of spoiled Iberian hams

This paper reports the use of an electronic nose for the identification of spoiled hams during the curing process. The sensors involved are tin oxide semiconductor thin films. They were prepared by RF sputtering. Some of the sensors were doped with metal catalysts as Cr and In. A good discrimination of two types of Iberian hams (spoiled and unspoilt) has been obtained through the statistical methods of principal component analysis (PCA) and probabilistic neural network (PNN).