Dielectric Properties and Product Variables

Abstract

The dielectric and electrical properties of materials, including foods have been used for many years for the rapid determination of single product variables such as water. In fact water has received a great deal of attention over the years mainly because of its pronounced electric dipolar nature. This means that its presence in a material influences strongly the dielectric properties of the material. More recently however, attention has been diverted from the simple problem of water content determination to the more complicated situation of water determination in the presence of another perturbing variable such as the bulk density of particulate solids (see for example Meyer and Schilz (1980) and Kress-Rogers and Kent (1987)) or the determination of other compositional or product variables.