Quantifying milk proteins using infrared photodetection for portable equipment
2021
Raw milk quality is a key component in dairy chains and it demands producers to evaluate it routinely to ensure the safety and composition of their products. The amounts of protein and fat in milk are normally used as quality standards. The protein content of milk is quantified in laboratories most often using spectroscopically resolved techniques, which are usually expensive and bulky, making them inadequate for assessing the milk properties on-site by small producers. This paper presents a new method to determine the protein concentration in milk based on the detection of the integral current generated by a quantum dot infrared photodetector fabricated with III-V semiconductors. The approach is an alternative to spectroscopically resolved techniques, allowing the design of portable equipment to measure milk characteristics on-site. Casein is used as a protein reference to calibrate the detection system. The method used to quantify the protein content from the photocurrent's integral intensity is described, and the sensitivity for two different detectors is reported to be in the picoampere range for a change of 10 percentage points in milk concentration, corresponding to 0.3 g/100 ml of protein.
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