Economically motivated adulterations of food, in general, and spices, in particular, are an emerging threat to world health. Reliable techniques for the rapid screening of counterfeited ingredients in the supply chain need further development. Building on the experience gained with CO2 lasers, the Diagnostic and Metrology Laboratory of ENEA realized a compact and user-friendly photoacoustic laser system for food fraud detection, based on a quantum cascade laser. The sensor has been challenged with saffron adulteration. Multivariate data analysis tools indicated that the photoacoustic laser system was able to detect adulterants at mass ratios of 2% in less than two minutes.

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In industrial contexts it might be useful to deploy Wireless Sensor Networks to constantly monitor the status of a plant. At early design stage of any monitoring application, it is envisaged to reinforce real-time paradigms both for task execution and nodeto-node communication.Model driven applications are usually seamless provided the system description is complete and robust, and the code generation (platform specific) appropriately complies with the model.We present a demo where acceleration measurements gathered by sensor nodes are conveyed to a fixed location devoted to surveillance. A higher level control system or an operator can take action whenever these readings deviate from the expected behavior.We follow a model-based implementation of the system exploiting the Scilab / Scicos support for the ERIKA Enterprise real-time kernel. Timeliness at the node level is reinforced by the features of the kernel scheduler; moreover the recent implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless communication standard permits time bounded communications among the nodes 1 .

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