Abstract
Water-holding capacity (WHC) is the ability of muscle to retain naturally occurring moisture in meat. WHC is a growing problem in the meat industry affecting yield and quality of the meat. Numerous methods have been applied to determine WHC such as the bag drip method and filter paper compression. However, such methods of measuring WHC/drip loss are time-consuming. This chapter reviews some of the current methods used for determination of WHC. The chapter will also present a novel method to measure drip loss and hence determine WHC using a microwave cavity. The cavity is first modeled using Ansys High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) which is a 3D full wave EM field simulation package that can be used to design microwave structures. The cavity is then constructed, tested and evaluated in LJMU laboratories. Results obtained using different types of meat such as; pork, chicken, beef and lamb are presented and discussed. Attained results indicate that determination of WHC using microwave spectroscopy is a promising alternative to the exciting methods.
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This work has been conducted as part of the EUREKA project entitled “Increased Efficiency: Moving from Assumed Quality to Online Measurement and Process Control” (INFORMED, Project Number 6748).
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Abdullah, B.M., Cullen, J.D., Korostynska, O., Mason, A., Al-Shamma’a, A.I. (2014). Assessing Water-Holding Capacity (WHC) of Meat Using Microwave Spectroscopy. In: Mason, A., Mukhopadhyay, S., Jayasundera, K., Bhattacharyya, N. (eds) Sensing Technology: Current Status and Future Trends I. Smart Sensors, Measurement and Instrumentation, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02318-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02318-2_7
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