[tobi]

Hello everyone,
I was hoping someone could help me with my engineering/chemistry project.
We are trying to create a degradation sensor for meat packaging. Our idea was to have something detect when oxygen enters a meat product that is vacuum-sealed. I want to know anyone's thoughts on this? I was originally thinking of having something to measure the lipid oxidation of meat but I'm not sure if that's possible.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.   

[Corribus]

Sure. Anything is possible, but is it useful?

Consider the sampling problems for your applicatin. Let's say you have a 1 lb chunk of meat in a vacuum packaged plastic that is impermeable to oxygen. The plastic is in direct contact with the meat. The plastic has a pinhole somewhere. You are proposing to detect the pinhole by developing a sensor to detect oxidized lipids in the meat. This is based on the idea that if oxygen enters through a pinhole, it reacts with lipids on the meat surface immediately near the pinhole.

Do you see the sampling problem? The lipids are in the meat and to detect them you have to sample the meat surface. But the whole premise is that you don't know where the pinhole is (or even if it exists), so you have to sample the entire meat. That's a large area. Does your method work through the plastic? If not, you have to unwrap the meat and sample the surface. But now you've destroyed the packaging, which kind of defeats the purpose: if you have to destroy the packaging to see whether there's a problem with the packaging, it's not a useful technology. So you need something that can sample an entire meat surface through the plastic without destroying the plastic..

Who is the intended user of the his product? If it's industry, you also need to have high throughput. A sensor that requires 10 minutes to scan a whole package for oxidized lipids isn't very useful if a manufacturer needs to scan thousands of packages a day.

One other thing. Your method would need to discriminate lipids that were oxidized by the pinhole from lipids that were oxidized before the meat was packaged. Now, in theory you could have a baseline to compare your measurement to, but suppose the baseline surface oxidization of lipids varies a lot. That could be a problem.

Point is, from an engineering standpoint, these practical issues are just as important to consider as the chemical concept underlying the detection method. It would certainly be possible to detect oxidized lipids. Can you build a sensor around it that accommodates practical needs? That is the real challenge.