Anagrafe della ricerca

Foreign body contamination in food is one of the major sources of complaints against food manufacturers, and can lead to injury, loss of brand loyalty and large recall expenses. Complaints have risen year on year driven by numerous factors, such as more mechanized process chain, increasing variety of materials present in the production chain, and growing consumer awareness. Different technologies, such as X-ray or infrared techniques, are currently applied to detection systems used for food inspection, but physical contamination, with e.g. wood, plastic, metal and glass, is still present in food. In the last years, possibly due to the increasing automation of supply chains, the occurrence of metal incidents has risen and incidents with plastics and glass remain significant. For this reason, there is the need to develop new technologies capable to address the still unmet needs of food industry. In the MIT-food project, we will investigate the use of the microwave imaging (MWI) technology for food contamination monitoring. MWI is able, through low-power electromagnetic (EM) waves at microwave frequencies, to non-invasively penetrate an object and provide a spatial map of its EM properties. Such a capability is herein relevant due to intrinsic difference in such properties between food and contaminants. The main objective of the MIT-Food project is to realize a prototypal device able to identify foreign objects in food using microwave imaging. This technology will be non-destructive and contactless, safe for operators (thanks to the use of low-power, non-ionizing radiations), able to provide inline monitoring in food manufacturing (thanks to tailored processing algorithms and their hardware implementation), easy to use and cost-efficient (thanks to low-cost technologies). The proposed research is strongly interdisciplinary crossing different fields: electromagnetism and imaging, electronic systems, chemistry and microbiology, and food science and technology.