Rapid identification and quantification of cheaper vegetable oil adulteration in camellia oil by using excitation-emission matrix fluorescence spectroscopy combined with chemometrics

Abstract

Camellia oil is a high quality oil mainly produced in southern China. It is common that unscrupulous merchants attempt to make huge profits by adulterating camellia oil with other cheaper or lower-quality vegetable oils. Therefore, this paper proposed excitation-emission matrix fluorescence spectroscopy combined with chemometric methods for the rapid identification and quantification of camellia oil adulteration with other cheaper vegetable oils. A five-component parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) model roughly completed spectral characterization of oil samples, and obtained chemically meaningful information. Four advanced chemometrics methods were used for the classification of camellia oil and other vegetable oils (model 1) and the classification of camellia oil and adulterated camellia oil (models 2 and 3), respectively. Two-directional two-dimensional linear discriminant analysis ((2D)²LDA) was used for chemical data for the first time and showed huge potential. Furthermore, the developed N-PLS regression model used for the prediction of adulteration level in camellia oil showed satisfactory accuracy.

Keywords: Camellia oil; Chemometrics; Fluorescence spectroscopy; Multi-way classification; Parallel factor analysis.