Analysis of Piezoelectric Sensors in Adulteration of Bovine Milk Using the Chromatic Technique

Sensors applied in the food industry are important tools to quality control. Current analyses checking adulteration in milk are expensive and time consuming, because the sample need to be evaluated in laboratory environment. Thus, is important to develop methodologies and sensors to monitoring milk production. A common type of fraud is performed adding substances such as sodium hydroxide in order to increasing milk shelf life. In this study, we propose to use low-cost piezoelectric diaphragms transducers to implement a methodology to identify milk adulteration by mechanical waves propagation method (vibration and acoustic emission). Two piezoelectric diaphragms were used, the first was excited by a chirp signal with 1 V of amplitude and a frequency band since 0 to 65 kHz with 2 Hz of step, and concomitantly was acquitted the response signal of the second sensor installed in the opposite side since the actuator with a rate of 250 kHz. After acquire the data, these were processed using the chromatic technique, which extract three features: energy, average band and equivalent bandwidth, in order to classify the raw and the contaminated milk through clustering. The experimental results indicated that the methodology can differ raw and contaminated milk with 1% of sodium hydroxide. Therefore, the results reported in this study indicate that low-cost piezoelectric diaphragms are promissory to liquids quality control.