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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Athens, Georgia » U.S. National Poultry Research Center » Quality and Safety Assessment Research Unit » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #283903

Title: Investigating influence of temperature on radio-frequency dielectrica properties of chicken meat

Author
item Trabelsi, Samir

Submitted to: ASABE Annual International Meeting
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/25/2012
Publication Date: 7/29/2012
Citation: Trabelsi, S. 2012. Investigating influence of temperature on radio-frequency dielectrica properties of chicken meat. ASABE Annual International Meeting. Paper No. 121337363.

Interpretive Summary: Quality attributes of chicken meat are of interest to producers, processors, and consumers. They are often assessed through measurement of physical properties including color, pH (acidic or basic character), water holding capacity, drip loss, cook yield and texture. Procedures for determining these properties are tedious, time-consuming, and involve different types of costly instrumentation. Chicken meat is composed on average of 70% water, 20% proteins, and 5% lipids. Because water is the major component in chicken meat, dielectric spectroscopy, the study of dielectric properties variation with frequency, might be useful for rapid, nondestructive assessment of chicken meat quality. Therefore, dielectric properties of chicken breast meat were measured at frequencies from 200 MHz to 20 GHz at temperatures ranging from -20 oC to +25 oC to explore their variation with frequency and temperature of the meat. At a given temperature, the dielectric constant decreased with frequency with a faster rate at frequencies above 3-4 GHz. The dielectric loss factor is dominated by ionic conduction in the lower frequency range, and a broad dipolar relaxation is evident at higher frequencies. At a given frequency, the temperature dependence reveals a sharp increase of dielectric properties at about 0 oC which is typical of materials with high water content and indicates phase transition from ice-like behavior to that of liquid water. Both the frequency dependence and temperature dependence of the dielectric properties are important in understanding the dielectric behavior of poultry meat and may ultimately lead to identifying correlations between the dielectric properties and quality attributes of chicken meat. This paper reports interesting results of initial exploration of the dielectric behavior of chicken meat with respect dielectric properties variation with frequency and temperature. Continued research may reveal useful correlations between these properties and quality factors that can be used for rapid on-line tests for meat quality. Successful development of such techniques would be of benefit to poultry growers, processors, marketers and consumers of the final poultry meat products.

Technical Abstract: Dielectric properties of chicken breast meat were measured with an open-ended coaxial-line probe between 200 MHz and 20 GHz at temperatures ranging from -20 oC to +25 oC. At a given temperature, the dielectric constant decreased with frequency with a faster rate at frequencies above 3-4 GHz. The dielectric loss factor is dominated by ionic conduction in the lower range and a broad dipolar relaxation is evident at higher frequencies. At a given frequency, the temperature dependence reveals a sharp increase of dielectric properties at about 0 oC which is typical of materials with high water content and indicates phase transition from ice-like behavior to liquid.