A Cross Capacitive Sensor to Analyze the Quality of Cooked Edible Oil
摘要
Vegetable oils or fats have been an integral part of human civilization for ages. The poor quality of cooking oil recycled several times by street vendors not only deteriorates the nutritional value of the prepared food, but the formation of Trans-Fat causes adverse health impacts. The concentration of Total Polar Compounds (TPC), an indicator of the quality of oil, increases with the thermal degradation of oil affecting its chemical and electrical properties. The TPC and dielectric constant are directly related, and hence dielectric sensor offers advantages over the available chemical methods for TPC measurement. In this work, a brief experimental study has been conducted on Soyabean oil samples tested along five phases of heating using a cross-capacitive sensor. The unknown samples of oil collected from the university campus canteen are also tested for quality analysis. There is a change in the capacitance value of the sensor tested on different cooked oil samples. The results demonstrated a strong correlation between the electrical capacitance and the number of heating cycles with \(R^{2} = 0.98\) . The results obtained are useful in analyzing the quality of cooked oil.