Milk fraud by the addition of water using an ultrasonic echo-pulse technique

Abstract

Milk is one of the essential food commodities and plays a crucial role in the diet of human nutrition. The quality of milk has been challenge in industry due to the threat of adulteration. Adulteration in food products has many aspects such as the addition of prohibited substance either partly or wholly for the state of financial gain, the lack of hygienic conditions of processing and storing, the decreasing of the amounts of original ingredients, or the changing of their chemistry itself which leads to the consumer being cheated. Ignorance of this fact is not fair since this may endanger consumer health. With the aim of monitoring milk quality at distribution points, a non-destructive pulse-echo method was proposed to evaluate the water content in powdered milk. The results indicate the ability to measure the adulterant level based on the value of the peak to peak amplitude at room temperature. In addition, the technique that is developed in the present work involves only one transducer which is non-invasive and considered as a very important in the food industry for hygiene reasons.