A minimalist Chinese liquor identification system based on a colorimetric sensor array with multiple applications

Abstract

The components of Chinese liquor are influenced by geographical origins and raw materials. Currently, Chinese liquor identification systems are limited and have a single application that can distinguish only one nature of flavor type and production area. Four chemical reagents were successfully used to build this 3 × 1 simple colorimetric sensor array. This is the first time that a highly accurate colorimetric Chinese liquor sensor array was fabricated using only a few array points. It could distinguish four types of Chinese base liquors from Luzhou Laojiao, nine types of Chinese liquors with different flavor types, and seven types of Chinese liquors from different geographical origins. In order to ensure the accuracy, seven parallel samples were analyzed with water used as a control. PCA proved this sensor array to be effective. In LDA and HCA, every group was clearly classified. The “leave-one-out” cross-validation method was applied with 100% prediction ability in the three experiments. According to the results of the PCA, HCA, LDA, and the “leave-one-out” method, we can deduce that this colorimetric sensor array with multiple applications has great performance in discriminating Chinese liquors.