The following e-mail will be sent on your behalf.

 has sent the following story to you from ElectricNews.net.

The story is available from https://electricnews.net/news.html?code=8634064

Irish gadget sniffs out rotten food 
Friday, September 27 2002
by Andrew McLindon


The days of opening a carton of milk or a jar of mayonnaise, only to discover the
food has gone bad, may soon be over thanks to a high-tech innovation at DCU. 

Aisling McEvoy of the National Centre for Sensor Research in Dublin City
University (DCU) and her team are working on placing sensors coatings on the
inside of food packages so that their integrity can be confirmed using a scanner.
The current way to test whether food is being kept fresh is invasive and leads to
the destruction of hundreds of packages in each batch produced, said the
researchers.

 

The "Intellipak" method also allows the packages to be tested anywhere along
their distribution route from the packaging plant right up to the supermarket
shelf. As McEvoy points out, this could help boost consumer confidence in food
safety, something that has dropped over the last number of years. 

 

Food is currently preserved by air being removed from packs and replaced by a gas
atmosphere typically made up of carbon dioxide and nitrogen. However, such
packages are only randomly tested at the packaging plant and "best before"
dates are calculated on a statistical basis using a destructive method. 

 

According the Intellipak team, this involves withdrawal of a sample of gas from
the package using a needle probe, the use of electrochemical methods to measure
the oxygen concentration, and infrared techniques to measure the carbon dioxide
concentration. "A failed test leads to the destruction of a large number,
typically hundreds, of packages in the same batch," remarked McEvoy.

 

The researchers have already developed the sensors and the scanners to read them
are currently being worked on. It is expected that the project will be at a "very
advanced stage" in a year's time.

 

The work on this new method of testing food packages is being developed at the
National Centre for Sensor Research, which is one of three research centre housed
in a EUR45.5 million facility in DCU that was opened on Thursday. 

 

The centre is also home to the National Centre for Plasma Science and Technology,
the Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering, as well as
DCU's faculty of engineering and design. Combined, the centre has over 300
researchers.