The
demand for accurate and rapid quality inspection of agricultural
and food products has progressively increased since it is one of the
important key attributes in determining consumer preference. In this
sense, electronic nose (e-nose) devices capable of capturing a “smellprint”
of food products, combined to pattern recognition tools are advantageous
for the discrimination of similar complex mixtures. The design of
the sensing units composing the e-nose requires a judicious choice
of materials with distinct selectivity and specificity for achieving
outstanding performance. The present work reports on the development
of an e-nose based on nanocomposites obtained by the combination of
ZnO, In2O3, and ZnO/In2O3 nanoparticles with polypyrrole and poly(styrenesulfonate). The sensor
array was composed by six sensing units, which were exposed to 17
coffee samples. The coffee samples were successfully discriminated
by quality level with the aid of principal components analysis and
Euclidian distances by dendrograms. Therefore, the sensor array made
with nanocomposites is promising as an alternative tool for monitoring
the quality and classification of coffee samples.
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