Identification of food using an electronic tongue

The determination of quality of food stuffs, water and beverages and control of their correspondence to standards is an urgent problem. An electronic tongue based on the taste sensor arrays with data processing by pattern recognition tools has been developed as an instrument using identification of their quality in food industry. In this paper, the voltammetric electronic tongue consisted of seven working electrodes of different metals wire, which are stannum (Sn), niobium (Nb), palladium (Pd), titanium (Ti), ferrum (Fe), tungsten (W) and platinum (Pt), and a reference electrode which is molybdenum (Mo). Pattern recognition method is an artificial neural network based on BP algorithm. The taste of fruit juice and milk can be discussed qualitatively using the electronic tongue. The output of this voltammtric electronic tongue shows that different patterns for chemical substances have different taste output. It can identify some sorts of 100% concentration fruit juice, such as apple, red grape, pineapple and orange. Three kinds of fat content milk such as 0.3%, 1.5% and 3.5%, can also be identified.