Rapid detection of pesticide-contaminated product using novel methods of NDT Technology

Although pesticides which are used to control plant pests and diseases increase the productivity, they have the potential to contaminate the environment and foods. By using pesticides excessively or incorrectly during production, ignoring the degradation period of pesticides and early harvesting, transferring to the market and selling the products immediately or a few days after spraying, the pesticides residue will exceed the maximum residue limits, thus indicating a potential risk to consumer health and safety. To ensure public health, it is essential to detect and determine pesticides contamination of agricultural products especially fruits and vegetables. Currently, several different destructive technologies are used to determine the concentration of pesticides residue which are destructive, have a highly time-consuming sample preparation, are very expensive, and require well-trained personnel and advanced laboratories. Therefore, development of a non-destructive, fast, simple, low-cost, environmentally friendly and reliable detection technique of pesticides residue is imperative. In this paper, some advances in non-destructive testing technology which can use for rapid detection of pesticides-contaminated product are presented and a novel portable system designed based on visible/near-infrared spectroscopy is introduced for this end.