Evaluation of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) for Detection of Acetone in the Context of Food Safety and Quality Application

Development of sensors for detection of contaminated food products is important to ensure safety of the community. This paper focuses on detection of a compound, acetone associated with pathogen contamination and spoilage of beef in packaged condition. Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) technique was used to develop an integrated sensing system. This sensing system utilized laboratory prepared silver sol as the SERS substrate to detect acetone at low ppm and high ppb concentration. A set of eight experiments with two different experimental conditions were conducted. The first four set provided an estimated lower detection limit (LDL) ranging between 69.63 ppm and 630.17 ppm corresponding to the 1711 cm-1 and 532 cm-1 Raman shift (cm-1) regions, respectively. The second four sets of experiments provided a lower estimated LDL ranging between 9.78 ppm and 43.45 ppm corresponding to 1222 cm-1 and 532 cm-1, respectively. This study demonstrated the ability of this sensing system to detect the indicator compound.