Design, development and application of electronic nose instrument to rapidly detect spoilage of air, vacuum and modified atmosphere packaged camel minced meat

Maintaining the fresh quality of camel meat and increasing acceptability by consumers then devising an effective way of validating this which are major concerns to food safety and defense experts was the goal of this project. Electronic nose system was used as a rapid technique to classify the freshness of camel minced meat samples during 20 cold storage days in different modified atmosphere packaging. Headspace gas analysis and Microbiological measurements were performed simultaneously as spoilages indices. Sample delivery was based on the dynamic headspace method. The volatile compounds in the headspace of meat samples were introduced into a sensor chamber and the response signals of seven tin dioxide based Taguchi gas sensors (TGS) were recorded as a function of time and packaging type. A dedicated real-time data acquisition system based on a microcontroller and laptop have been used. Five static and dynamic features selected from the conductance transient response of each sensor were input to the pattern recognition engine. By implementing unsupervised principle component analysis (PCA) technique on sensor array response, we found that meat samples could be grouped into fresh and aged categories based on cold storage days and type of packages. Samples of all packages on the first day, those of the fifth day at oxygen, dioxide carbon and nitrogen and Samples of days ten and fifteen only at dioxide carbon were fresh. These results were align with head space gas and total viable count analyses. In conclusion dioxide carbon could be considered as the best package.