Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona (IMB-CNM), CSIC. Campus de la UAB, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain.
Mina Pública d'Aigües de Terrassa, S.A. C/de la Societat, 26, 08221 Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 Mar 23;19(6):1435. doi: 10.3390/s19061435.
The standards that establish water's quality criteria for human consumption include organoleptic analysis. These analyses are performed by taste panels that are not available to all water supply companies with the required frequency. In this work, we propose the use of an electronic tongue to perform organoleptic tests in drinking water. The aim is to automate the whole process of these tests, making them more economical, simple, and accessible. The system is composed by an array of electrochemical microsensors and chemometric tools for multivariable processing to extract the useful chemical information. The array of sensors is composed of six Ion-Sensitive Field Effect Transistors (ISFET)-based sensors, one conductivity sensor, one redox potential sensor, and two amperometric electrodes, one gold microelectrode for chlorine detection, and one nanocomposite planar electrode for sensing electrochemical oxygen demand. A previous study addressed to classify water samples according to taste/smell descriptors (sweet, acidic, salty, bitter, medicinal, chlorinous, mouldy, and earthy) was performed. A second study comparing the results of two organoleptic tests (hedonic evaluation and ranking test) with the electronic tongue, using Partial Least Squares regression, was conducted. The results show that the proposed electronic tongue is capable of analyzing water samples according to their organoleptic characteristics, which can be used as an alternative method to the taste panel.
该标准建立了人类饮用水的水质标准，包括感官分析。这些分析是由感官小组进行的，但并非所有供水公司都能以所需的频率进行这些分析。在这项工作中，我们提出使用电子舌来进行饮用水的感官测试。目的是使这些测试自动化，使其更经济、更简单、更普及。该系统由电化学微传感器阵列和化学计量学工具组成，用于多元处理以提取有用的化学信息。传感器阵列由六个基于离子敏感场效应晶体管（ISFET）的传感器、一个电导率传感器、一个氧化还原电位传感器和两个电流型电极组成，一个用于检测氯的金微电极和一个用于检测电化学需氧量的纳米复合平面电极。之前的一项研究根据味觉/气味描述符（甜、酸、咸、苦、药味、氯味、霉味和土味）对水样进行了分类。第二项研究使用偏最小二乘回归比较了电子舌与两种感官测试（愉悦评估和排序测试）的结果。结果表明，所提出的电子舌能够根据其感官特征分析水样，可以作为味觉小组的替代方法。
