Milk total solids and fat content soft sensing via electrical resistance tomography and temperature measurement

The novel, robust and high speed method of process imaging, electrical resistance tomography (ERT), can potentially provide the user with the multidimensional information required for automatic process monitoring and control. In this study it has been applied for the first time in the non-invasive analysis of various milk solutions for quantitative auditing and attaining informative data, such as total solids and fat content at constant temperature in the various stages of milk processing. Although various other methods of total solids and fat content measurement are being applied, most have disadvantages such as imprecision and sampling problems. No other existing methods have the capability of providing dynamic, spatially distributed knowledge of the data variation while also enabling visual access into opaque solutions and vessels.The proposed method provides an average accuracy of over 96% in milk total solids and fat content measurement. Such accuracy is comparable to the precision of current methods of off-line point measurements, with the advantage of providing continuous output data which is crucial for process control applications.