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Methods for the chemical and sensorial evaluation of olive oil are frequently changed and tuned to oppose the increasingly sophisticated frauds. Although a plethora of promising alternatives has been developed, chromatographic techniques remain the more reliable yet, even at the expense of their related execution time and costs. In perspective of a continuous increment in the number of the analyses as a result of the global market, more rapid and effective methods to guarantee the safety of the olive oil trade are required. In this study, a novel artificial sensorial system, based on gas and liquid analysis, has been employed to deal with olive oil genuineness and authenticity issues. Despite these sensors having been widely used in the field of food science, the innovative electronic interface of the device is able to provide a higher reproducibility and sensitivity of the analysis. The multi-parametric platform demonstrated the capability to evaluate the organoleptic properties of extra-virgin olive oils as well as to highlight the presence of adulterants at blending concentrations usually not detectable through other methods.

In this paper, an integrable novel fully analog Wheatstone bridge-based interface for differential capacitance estimation is presented. Its working principle takes advantage of the modified De-Sauty AC bridge configuration being employed only by two capacitors and two resistors. A feedback loop controls one of the resistors (e.g. a voltage-controlled resistor), to obtain an evaluation of the differential capacitance variation on a full range, thanks to a general but very simple formula that considers both the 'auto-balancing' and the bridge 'out-of-equilibrium' ranges. The proposed interface shows a satisfactory accuracy, being the percentage relative error within 0.45% for the experimental results.

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