Electronic Measurement of Milk Adulteration using Microwave Frequencies

Abstract

Food adulteration is an act for debasing the quality of food with an admixture or through the substitution of inferior substances or by removing some invaluable ingredients from the food product. Milk could be adulterated by adding water or by removing the cream or by adding artificial coloring agents like Annatto, caramel, coal tar, preservatives like formaldehyde, boric and other acids. There are several ways of identifying whether the milk has been adulterated or not and most of these techniques use chemicals. In this paper a method is proposed which is based on the change in the dielectric constant of the milk when it is adulterated. This change in the dielectric constant or the attenuation constant is frequency dependent and can be measured at microwave frequencies. In this paper an experimental set up has been proposed using a microwave frequency source and Arduino board is used.