RAPID MEASUREMENT OF PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF CHEDDAR CHEESE USING A NONCONTACT ULTRASOUND TECHNIQUE

Abstract

This article discusses the first known application of the noncontact piezoelectric ultrasound system for physicalproperty measurement of food with specific application to cheese. A noncontact ultrasound parameter called the relativeattenuation and the ultrasound velocity were measured and correlated with the physical properties of Cheddar cheese (suchas failure strain, failure stress, Youngs modulus, and toughness) using a multilinear neural network analysis. When therelative attenuation, velocity, and cheese types were used as inputs to the neural network, the squared correlation values forthe prediction of failure strain, failure stress, secant madulus, and toughness of Cheddar cheese were 0.836, 0.947, 0.625,and 0.956, respectively. Results indicated that the noncontact ultrasound technique has excellent potential for rapid andautomatic quality measurement of the physical properties of Cheddar cheese.