Detection of Olive Oil Adulteration by Visible Spectroscopy Technique

Abstract

_{In this study, simple, fast and cost-effective analytical technique based on visible fluorescence spectroscopy was employed for adulteration detection in the olive oil. Olive oil was mixed with three low quality edible oils in Iraq; sunflower, vegetable and corn, in volume concentrations of 25, 50, 75, and 100%. The excitation-fluorescence map shows that the luminescence of the olive oil occurred at around 675 nm when it excited in UV-NIR region. Therefore, a 532 nm green laser was used as an excitation source for olive oil adulteration. In pure olive oil, a clear orange color was shown and it became faint color gradually by only adding a small concentration of the mixed oils and disappeared with a high concentration. Moreover, the emitted intensity peaks at 675 nm showed a linear decay with increasing the concentration of adulterant oils; this is true for sunflower and vegetable oils. However, impurity with corn oil showed nonlinear trend with the concentration. The technique used in this study can pave the way for fast and real time detection for olive oil quality.}