Applied Research
Applied research is performed in the areas of agricultural and food process engineering, post-harvest technology, and diagnostics for life sciences.
Agricultural engineering
NIR spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging equipment have been mounted on agricultural machinery for on-the-go sensing of soil fertility, estimating the fertiliser value of manure, crop growth status , presence of pests and diseases and the quality of the harvested product. More recently, the potential of NIR spectroscopy for monitoring the health of dairy cows through on-line milk composition measurement is being investigated. Current research in the agricultural machinery domain also involves hyperspectral detection of flower buds on pear trees for mechatronic thinning and hyperspectral detection of apples and grapes for robotic harvesting.
Food process engineering
The potential of NIR spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging for the assessment of product quality, in terms of chemical composition, texture and the absence of defects, has been demonstrated for agricultural food products such as fruit and vegetables, eggs and cheese. Current research is dedicated to hyperspectral imaging in the NIR (1000-2500 nm) for visualising the distribution of the major components and structural changes in food products and spatially-resolved spectroscopy for assessment of food microstructure.
Diagnostics in life sciences
The biophotonics group is involved in a strategic basic research project aimed at the development of an implantable spectroscopic sensor for continuous glucose monitoring in humans. The role of MeBioS is to characterise the optical properties of tissue growing on the implanted sensor and to take this into account in the multivariate sensor calibration.
