Application of electronic tongue on black tea beverage discrimination

The study was aimed to detect the application of the electronic tongue on tea beverage. Seven kinds of black tea beverage which was sold in the Chinese market were detected by the electronic tongue (ET) which was based on potentiometric chemical sensors developed by Alpha M.O.S. (Toulouse, France). All data were treated by multivariate data processing based on principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA). Those seven kinds of black tea beverage could be well discriminated by the electronic tongue. On the PC1 and PC2 score chart, all kinds of black tea beverage points fell on different districts and did not mix with each other and the discrimination index was 95.38. The results showed that the electronic tongue displayed great application potential in tea beverage quality examination and discrimination of fake tea products. Meanwhile, the research preliminarily discussed the applications of cluster analysis on the electronic tongue data processing.