NIR Spectrometry & Calibration
What is NIR?
Near-infrared (NIR) spectrometry and calibration are powerful tools for monitoring, regulating and controlling processes that determine product quality within many different industries.
Examples of the industries that utilize NIR are:
- Agriculture industry
- Forestry industry
- Food industry
- Pharmaceutical industry
- Chemical industry
- Biotech industry
- Clinical measurement
- Environmental measurement
- Waste management
It is possible to predict chemical or physical characteristics of a sample, based on the comparison of its spectra to the spectra of samples containing known characteristics, as determined by traditional laboratory reference methods.
The NIR method is approved for analysis of many agriculture products and is much faster and less expensive than wet chemistry, when many samples are to be evaluated.
How does Taste Tech NIR work?
A halogen light, similar to those used in domestic lighting, is used to illuminate the fruit. Some of the light penetrates the fruit and is retransmitted. This effect can be observed by holding a fruit to a bright lamp in a dark room; the fruit will glow at a distance from where the light is shining on it.
The color of the transmitted/reflected light is affected by the internal properties of the fruit. For example, a high brix fruit will absorb more light at certain wavelengths than a low brix fruit. This color difference, which is too subtle to be interpreted by the human eye, contains information about the internal properties of the fruit.
A spectrometer, which is an extremely sensitive color detector, is used to measure the color difference in the transmitted/reflected light. A digital signal processor (DSP) is used to process the information from the spectrometer and estimate the brix acid or other properties.
The following graph shows the spectra of transmitted light from two pieces of fruit with different brix.
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