Rapid adulteration detection for flaxseed oil using ion mobility spectrometry and chemometric methods

Abstract

To prevent the potential adulteration of flaxseed oil with high amounts of nutritional components, a simple and rapid adulteration detection method was proposed based on ion mobility spectrometry (IMS). After dilution in n-hexane, the edible oil sample was analyzed by IMS for 20 s. Subsequently, the multivariate statistical methods, including principal component analysis (PCA) and recursive support vector machine (R-SVM), were employed to establish a discriminant model for authentic and adulterated flaxseed oils. The cross validation results indicated that the R-SVM model could identify adulterated flaxseed oil samples (≥5%) with a high accuracy of 93.1%. Therefore, IMS could be used as an important tool to protect customers from adulterated flaxseed oil.