A proof of concept study has been published that successfully used electrical capacitance measurement as a rapid, low cost, non-destructive test to verify the authenticity of edible oils.
The authors, from the Singapore Agency for Science Technology and Research, report that they could directly screen for adulteration of Extra Virgin Olive Oil by capturing the differences in the dielectric properties of mixed oils. It exploits the different dielectric constants of different fatty acids. The sensor system displayed a fast response (100 ms) and low detection limits for different adulterants (olive oil (32.8%), canola oil (19.4%), soy oil (10.3%) and castor oil (1.7%)), making it suitable for high-throughput or in-line screening. A low-cost automated system prototype demonstrated the possibility of scaling up this proof of concept for inline integration. It was configured with a simple red (fail) or green (pass) LED display.
The full open-access article is available here
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