CCAS have developed a method of detecting oil contamination before any food comes into contact with the packaging in just such facilities. Pattern-recognition algorithms intimately married with the production line control apparatus determine the location of the contamination and reject the contaminated packaging. The aim is to rapidly determine molecularly specific spectra during the final stages of solid phase synthesis as well as in screening applications using solid phase affinity reagents. We are also investigating novel methods for the detection of antibiotics in complex mixtures. Multivariate electrochemical measurement is followed by neural network deconvolution of the complex signal to obtain drug qualification.
Future work is geared towards calibration using non-linear functions.