An instrument to test
Olive Oil Purity
Omar Daouk Mohamad Abou Daher Fatima Moussaoui Ali Shouman N.A. Saliba
AUB – Chemical Engineering Department - Chemistry Department
Olive oil can be contaminated by many impurities.
When contaminated, oil can cause damage to our
bodies:
Cancer, free radical damage,…
Therefore, we designed an instrument that
.measures olive oil purity
:Method
Pure olive oil maximum absorption: 390-
.410
light source : laser, the sample absorbs the
light emitted by the laser and emits a visible
.light
The light reaches the LDR resistor,
connected to a 9 voltage source, and
according to the voltage output we can
know the purity of the sample. All in a black
.box to minimize stray light interferences
We first test the resistance for a
100% pure olive oil, then we start to
manipulate the percentages and
record the values we get for each
.sample
:Results
Pure olive oil will emit a pink or -
purple light, while non pure oil will emit
.green light
.purity  7.2 volt output 100% -
. 7.4 v 75% -
. 7.4 to 7.6 v 50% -
.7.6 to 7.8 v 25% -
. >8.4 v 0%-
:Discussion
There is some error in the measurements-
due to stray light, since the black box is not
.a full insulator of light
laser light may not always emit at lambda-
max thus detector wont get maximum
.emission from sample
:References
Analysis of Olive Oils by Fluorescence
Spectroscopy: Methods and Applications
Ewa Sikorska1, Igor Khmelinskii2 and
Marek Sikorski3
1Faculty of Commodity Science, Poznań
,University of Economics
2Universidade do Algarve, FCT, DQF and
,CIQA, Faro
3Faculty of Chemistry, A. Mickiewicz
University, Poznań,1,3Poland, 2Portugal