Supervision of rinses in a washing machine by a voltammetric electronic tongue

A study that investigates if it is possible to discriminate between the different rinses in a household washing machine with a voltammetric electronic tongue is concluded. The voltammetric electronic tongue applies a potential pulse train over two electrodes and measures the produced current. Multivariate data analysis is used to treat the data. In this paper, a simplified electronic tongue, with only 5% of the original current responses, is used. The rinses from 20 machine wash runs with four different prerequisites are investigated. Principal component analysis (PCA) and Soft-independent modelling of class analogy (SIMCA) are used in order to classify the rinses. In PCA, only one of the rinses is classified erroneous, and in SIMCA none of the rinses are classified only to the wrong class, although 38% of the rinses are classitied to more than one class. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.