Fast Ingredient Analysis Of Edible Oils Using A Portable Raman Spectrometer

Edible oils are not only a major source of nutrition but also a key basic material in the food industry. Vegetable oils are increasingly important because of their high content in mono- and polyunsaturated fatty acids in comparison with animal fats. In this application note, the main ingredients of olive oil, camellia oil, arachis oil, sunflower seed oil, and colza oil are analyzed using a portable Raman spectrometer combined with chemometrics software from B&W Tek. 

Traditional edible-oil analysis methods such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) are extremely time consuming and work only under laboratory conditions. Raman spectroscopy, to the contrary, is rapid and do not require any sample preparation steps prior to analysis. The samples studied include oils with different concentration of oleic, linoleic, mono- and poly-unsaturated fatty acids. The aim of this study was to rapidly determine component concentration in several edible oils for at-line testing. Thus, it highlights the capability of portable Raman spectroscopy to provide information about the chemical processes taking place during lipid oxidation in a rapid and experimentally simple way.