Detecting internal quality of peanuts during storage using electronic nose responses combined with physicochemical methods.

In this study, the changes in the quality of unshelled peanuts and peanut kernels during storage were analyzed using an electronic nose (e-nose). The physicochemical indexes (acid and peroxide values) of peanut kernels were tested by traditional method as a reference. The storage time of peanut kernels increases from left to right in the cluster analysis plot based on the physicochemical indexes. The "maximum values", "area values", and "70th s values" methods were applied to extract the feature data from the e-nose responses. Principal component analysis (PCA) results indicated that the "70th s values" method produced the most accurate results, furthermore, unshelled peanut and peanut kernel samples presented similar characteristics in the PCA plots; the partial least squares regression (PLSR) results showed that the features of unshelled peanuts and peanut kernels are highly correlated with acid and peroxide values, respectively.