Determination of tobacco constituents with acousto-optic tunable filter-near infrared spectroscopy

In the present work, we developed an acousto-optic tunable filter near infrared (AOTF-NIR) reflectance spectroscopy method for determining tobacco constituents. The NIR spectra of 443 tobacco samples were collected using an AOTF-NIR spectrometer. Calibration models for total sugar, reducing sugar, nicotine and potassium in tobacco were built by partial least squares (PLS) regression for which regression R-2 were 0.984, 0.987, 0.988 and 0.920, respectively and the average relative standard deviations between the predicted values and the measured values were 2.68%, 2.88%, 4.18% and 8.38%, respectively. The results indicate that the AOTF-NIR technique is feasible for the analysis of tobacco constituents and provides a foundation for on-line monitoring in the tobacco process. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyse tobacco constituents with AOT-NIR spectroscopy.