Now, electronic nose to test tea quality

The United Planters' Association of Southern India (UPASI) has announced that the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has developed electronic Tongue/E-Nose, an indigenous tea quality monitoring instrument.

According to J K Thomas, President, UPASI, the 'electronic tongue' was developed after two years of research by the scientists at CDAC. The working model of this instrument was demonstrated at the fifth workshop of the National Tea Research Foundation (NTRF) at Kolkata recently.

"The instrument has the potential to improve the quality of Indian tea significantly and the Tea Board and NTRF should take urgent action to see that it is made available to the industry in the shortest possible time," he added.

The electronic tongue or E-Nose is an instrument designed to detect and discriminate complex odours using an array of sensors consisting of a broadly tuned (non-specific) sensors treated with a variety of odour-sensitive biological or chemical materials.

An odour stimulus generates a characteristic fingerprint from this array of sensors. The patterns or 'fingerprints' from the known odours can be subsequently classified and identified.

This system, according to Thomas, is also capable of sensing volatile compounds of tea and reliably predicting tea taster-like scores with a high degree of accuracy. The neural network-based 'soft computing techniques' are used to tune the near accurate co-relation smell print of the multi-sensor array with that of the tea tasters' scores.

The system is backed by a software framework designed with adequate flexibility and openness so that tea planters (and tasters) can themselves train the system with their own way of scoring and the system will, from then on, reliably predict such smell print scores.