Industrial food production demands critical consideration and care in relation to biological, physical and chemical hazards, which must be monitored and managed along the whole food supply chain in order to ensure food quality and safety and consumer health. Sensor systems offer a means to monitor biological and chemical hazards of a diverse nature, including microorganisms, natural biological toxins, chemical or processing contaminants, as well as traces of cleaning and sterilising agents. Inline tracking and alert of the incidences of related hazard markers allow for the implementation and execution of suitable (automated) control mechanisms. Supporting the prevention of ingress, growth and accumulation of these hazards is especially critical during food production when residual microorganism multiply rapidly, requiring more frequent and/or intense sanitation events. This multitude of challenges requires a high diversity of system approaches, especially for inline measurements, which additionally need to be fast and inexpensive. Broadband detectors, such as photoionization detector or semiconductor sensor systems require additional measures for selective detection. Pre-separation by selective filters, sampling, or even chromatographic methods are possible approaches. For semiconductor sensors, dynamic operation modes and sensor arrays combined with multi-signal processing can be used for the selective detection of certain organic and inorganic gases. For ultimate selectivity, sensors based on odor binding proteins can complement the detector toolbox. To enable an efficient generation of new system approaches, the effort of system development needs to be reduced by effective models of the individual system components in order to allow the simulation of new systems by strongly reducing the development costs and thereby enabling widespread implementation for monitoring purposes along the production line.

Sensing challenges in monitoring hygienic hazards in critical production areas

ACS Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting

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