Plastic Optical Fiber Sensor for Real Time Density Measurements in Wine Fermentation

In many industrial applications, like in fermentation, liquids density varies during the process and the measurement of this variable continuously is vital for final product quality. In wine fermentation this measurement is made traditionally in a manual form, and several times to the day, during the process. The automatically data acquisition of the density during the wine fermentation would suppose a considerable time and cost saving, and a smaller risk of losing the product besides the possibility to increase the quality of the final product. In this paper, the authors expose a continuously monitoring density sensor for wine fermentation. The sensor is based in plastic optical fiber probes and it can be placed inside the must tank for an on-line density measurement. The graphs obtained in the firsts tests of the sensor are shown and the excellent correlation between the developed sensor and the measurement of density taken periodically by manual form can be observed.