A measurement prototype based on gas sensors for detection of pesticide residues in edible mint

In this article, we propose a measurement prototype based on an electronic nose device to discriminate the treated mint from the untreated mint with pesticides and to identify the day of treatment. The process consists of a sample of mint, two types of pesticides (Decis Fluxx and Malyphos 50), an electronic nose composed of a network of metal oxide sensors, a data card acquisition, a personal computer and a data analysis and processing method. The method used is a hybrid method combining the principal component analysis method with the support vector machines method and allowed us to have success rates of 100%, 87.50% and 75% successively for discrimination in the following cases: untreated and treated mint by Decis, untreated and treated mint by Malyphos and untreated and treated mint with both products. For the identification of the treatment day, we obtained success rates of around 87.50% and 100% respectively for the case of the Decis product and the Malyphos product. These results show that our proposal is quick, easy to use and inexpensive for the detection of the treated mint as well as the day of its treatment.