Portable electronic nose for beverage quality assessment

A portable electronic nose (e-nose) was appropriately designed for investigating quality of beverages such as juice or wine, etc. The e-nose system comprises of sample and reference containers, air flow unit, sensing unit and data acquisition unit. All of the hardware units were controlled by in-house software under LABVIEW program via USB port of a DAQ card. The sensing unit includes eight different metal oxide gas sensors from Figaro Engineering Inc. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used as a statistical method in order to discriminate and assess the experimental data as defined by the percentage change in sensor resistances that correlates directly to difference in the aroma characteristics. Drift compensation model was applied to the raw data that sometimes suffer from the effects of sensor drift. Constructed portable e-nose has been tested on-field in a winery to evaluate wine aroma during process of wine bottling. The e-nose using PCA algorithm can distinguish the wine bottling under nitrogen from the bottling under partial vacuum. We also demonstrated that e-nose can be used to help wine maker to design the appropriate process of wine bottling achieving a high quality of wine product.