Quality Evaluation of Flavored Cut Tobacco Using Sensor Array Fingerprint Technology of Electronic Nose

In order to obtain a fast and available process to control the quality of flavored cut tobacco, the sensor array fingerprint technology of electronic nose (E-nose) was applied in identifying of flavored cut tobacco according to volatile compounds. The data acquired by electronic nose were analyzed by the principal component analysis (PCA) in order to reduce data dimension and optimize feature vectors. The results indicated that electronic nose could discriminate cut tobacco from flavored cut tobacco and evaluate the uniformity of flavored cut tobacco effectively. The data analyzed by Statistical Quality Control (SQC) could evaluate the quality of flavored cut tobacco effectively according to the volatile components in cut tobacco during the production process. The shelf life of the electronic nose analyzed the effect of the storage time on change of volatile components of flavored cut tobacco. The results indicated that the volatile components of flavored cut tobacco decreased with the increase of the storage time; however, the uniformity of flavored cut tobacco was better with the increase of the storage time. According to the two factors, the best storage time for flavored cut tobacco was identified.